


Falling

by Hello_Spikey



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Season Rewrite Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-11-24
Updated: 2008-04-22
Packaged: 2019-06-12 08:14:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 24
Words: 29,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15335640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hello_Spikey/pseuds/Hello_Spikey
Summary: A dark re-write of Season Six, where a damaged Spike ends up willingly enslaved to a Buffy who came back wrong.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wicked_plum7](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=wicked_plum7).



> My very own pet fangirl, **wicked_plum7** requested a dark re-write of Season Six, where a damaged Spike ends up willingly enslaved to a Buffy who came back wrong, with Xander and Willow treading darker paths of their own, and Dawn coming to Spike's rescue, and the two of them saving the gang from themselves.
> 
> Or thereabouts. That's how I'm interpreting the request anyway. :)
> 
> I'm calling it "Falling" and it opens with the fall from the tower because I LOVE between-season-five-and-six Spike & Dawn caregiver fiction!!!!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this starts out not so dark, a little angst, your average post-Gift stuff... wrong!Buffy will appear in the next part.

The fall from the tower couldn’t kill him; vampires don’t die from falling. He would file that under ‘curse’ because he was left conscious, broken but able to raise himself onto his knees and see Buffy follow him, see her land as he had on the jagged debris. But slayers, they could die from falling. She looked peaceful, only a thin trail of blood in the corner of her mouth. He fell then, sobbing loudly, uncaring what anyone saw or thought.

He kept falling, until he awoke in a basement. Someone had carried him away – busted knees and broken feet from the fall – no one ever taught him how to fall right.

That’s what Giles says, and even demonstrates; there’s a way to FALL RIGHT. So you don’t jam your shins up through your knees and break all the bones in your feet and end up dragged into the basement because they don’t know where else to put you and Bit’s scared out of her mind you’ll walk into the sun. Not that you have the guts or feet to do it.

Spike supposed he had been out of it for a while. At some point, even grief isn’t enough to keep a mind occupied. You wake up, and know, suddenly, that you’re hungry, that it’s mid-afternoon, and that you can’t stand the sight of the basement walls one second longer.

He was thin, he could tell, his legs felt like sticks, and he felt so dried up and hollow he couldn’t imagine the weight would be anything at all, even on broken feet. But setting his feet on the ground had been torture. He fell. This time he fell as Giles had shown him, or a close approximation. He laughed at himself, lying on the cold basement floor.

Dawn ran down the stairs with more noise than one teenage girl should have created. “Spike! What are you doing up?”

“’Up’ she says,” he laughed, crawling to the cot so he could pull himself back on it.

Dawn’s human-hot hands grabbed him and her hair fell like silk all around him as she grunted and tugged. Her efforts half helped, half got in the way. Somehow it evened out and he lay on his back again, gasping and blinking the pain away.  
“How long have I been down here, Bit? How many weeks?”

She looked guilty. “Eight days.”

Eight days. “Hell,” he said. “Eight down. Eternity to go. Can you help me get up out of here, Niblet? I’ve been staring at that washing machine a week now and it’s starting to stare back.”

His voice sounded hollow to his own ears and Dawn’s smile was perfunctory – acknowledging that a joke had been made and, in happier times, would have been laughed at. “I’ll see what we can rig,” she said.

What they rigged was to have Xander and Tara – deemed the two strongest of the scoobies – carry him up the stairs and deposit him on the livingroom couch with much swearing and complaints about vampiric weight gain from Xander.

The livingroom became his new convelescent room. At least it smelled better than the basement, and people came and went, making it not feel so much like being locked up. Tara checked his bones now and again and shrugged. Dawn or Willow or even Xander brought him blood. Plus there was cable.

Dawn leaned back, at one with the couch cushions, only her hand with the remote moving as she flicked idly through channels. She was wearing pajamas, though it was nearly four in the afternoon, and cereal bowls and empty bags of snack food littered the coffee table.

Spike realized she’d been sitting there almost as long as he had. “Hey,” he nudged her with his foot. “Niblet. Don’t you got school?”

“It’s summer,” she said.

“Not studying at home, then?”

“No.”

“Don’t got any chores to do?”

She rolled her eyes.

He sat up and snatched the remote away.

“Hey!” she shouted as he turned the TV off. “I was watching that.”

“No, you really weren’t. You’ve been neglected.”

“I have not. This is normal, Spike. This is what I do in the summer.”

“What, spend all day watching soaps with a vampire?”

She crossed her arms and sank back into the cushions. “Everyone expects me to act normal. I can’t even tell my best friend what’s going on because the authorities might take me away. What am I supposed to do? I can’t hang out with Janice and not tell her!” Fresh tears fell down old tracks on her cheeks.

Spike swung his legs off the couch and scooted closer to her. “Maybe,” he said quietly, “Maybe the authorities should take you away. Eh? Maybe won’t be so bad. Not like they’re gonna throw you into a work house or somethin’.”

“They’ll send me to my dad.” She turned her face away. “He’s not even my real dad.”

“HE doesn’t know that.” Spike brushed the hair back from where it stuck to her wet cheek.

She shrugged his hand away. “Sometimes I think he does. If he did, it would make sense, the way he ignores me. He doesn’t care. Why couldn’t HE have died?”

“You don’t mean that, Bit.”

“Of course I do!” She stood and rubbed her eyes. “What do you care? I’m not even real! I’m not grieving. All these memories, all this love I have for… it’s not real.”

He grabbed her wrist and she struggled to free herself from his grip, but he held on and she had to stop, glaring down at him. “I’m not real, either,” he said. “You’re talking to a guy died a hundred years ago, okay? So let’s stop. Who’s to say what’s real and what isn’t. What you feel… that’s all that matters; all that really exists. You feel. An’ so do I. So as far as that, our feelings are real, and so are we.”

“You’re stupid,” she said. And sniffled a smile, because she couldn’t say childish things anymore without irony.

“Yeah. And you’re not spending the summer on the couch. Go put some clothes on.” He let go of her wrist and grimaced in sympathy as she rubbed the reddened skin.

While she ran upstairs he decided to stand. He ran a worried hand over his knees and then his feet, but he couldn’t tell if they felt proper or not. He grabbed onto the arm-rest and slowly put weight on his feet.

Dawn came down the stairs in a sundress to see him standing with his hands out like he was balancing on a tightrope. Her smile was genuine now. “Willow! Tara! He’s standing!” She whooped and ran for the kitchen.

“Hey! Little help for the invalid!” he called after her. “Don’t bloody celebrate my recovery without me!” He took a wincing step, nearly fell, and hung onto the edge of the couch.

The next day he woke from his nightmares as usual, but didn’t lay back wallowing in them. He got up as soon as he realized he was awake and walked a circuit of the first floor of the house. When Dawn finally emerged from her room, he had two slim books waiting for her.

He watched her read the titles. “You had Herodotus yet?”

“Yet?” She furrowed her brow. “You’re asking me if I’ve read this dusty old not-in-English thing YET?”

“They don’t torture kids in secondary school anymore?” Spike raised an eyebrow. “Anyway, you’re reading that this summer. This is the best Latin primer I could find.”

“Excuse me? Why?”

“Come on, I’m not making you do Greek! Because you need something to do.”

“No. I don’t. I can do nothing all day, every day. Easily. Watch me.”

“Bit!” He caught the books as she tossed them over her shoulder. “Niblet!” He swore under his breath as she easily outpaced him to the kitchen.

She’d already gotten herself a bowl of cereal by the time he’d gotten into the room, and he was limping a bit. He threw the books down on the counter beside her. “You NEED something to do. You can either learn Latin or get a job.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re going stir-crazy, Bit, and you’re taking me with you.”

She rolled her eyes. “No. Why Latin?” She poked the books with her spoon.

“Because it’s the only thing I learned in school that I found halfway useful.”

“Yeah, but you went to school a million years ago. No one SPEAKS Latin anymore.”

“They didn’t speak it when I was alive, either. How old do you think I am? Look, trust me, it’s useful. Half of everything lawyers say is in Latin and they don’t even know it.”

Dawn shook her head and stabbed her cornflakes.

Spike sighed. “’Bout two-thirds of Rupert’s books are in Latin.” Dawn looked up. He smiled and added the clincher, “And just about all of Red’s spells.”

She pulled the book closer to her bowl. “Okay,” she said, flipping the cover open. “But just because I have nothing better to do.”

“We’ll start real slow. Just a few words at a time. Best part is, when you know Latin, everyone thinks you’re smarter than you are.” He settled onto the stool opposite her, arms crossed on the counter.

She fiddled with the book-cover. “You just want something to do, yourself.”

He sighed. “Like soddin’ oxygen, pet. I’m about to chew the walls.” He smiled. “Besides, I’m supposed to be taking care of you.”

“Are not. Willow and Tara are taking care of me. I’M taking care of YOU.”

“That you are, pet. Now, let’s get started. That page you’ve got open…”

They leaned together over the book, both smiling at the quiet sensation of doing something that wasn't grieving.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place during "Bargaining", and I had to stop myself from quoting the whole dang episode, just about, but you'll see, I think, the oh-so-subtle point at which I leave canon. :)

They fell into a comfortable routine. And if at times there were elephants in the room and uncomfortable silences, well, what family didn’t have that? Spike headed out to slay at night with the whole gang – filling in for the slayer, taking down the increased monster population since Glory’s doorway had been opened, however briefly.  
  
If there weren’t friendly smiles for him, they at least never forgot to come get him when there was a big bad afoot.  
  
And he watched out for Dawn. He risked the sun when she was late coming home, for whatever reason, and found himself patrolling the Bronze as much as the cemeteries.  
  
He pulled her out of a booth by the sleeve of her very skimpy top. “That’s enough for one night, young lady.”  
  
The other teen girls looked at him incredulously. “Omigawd! Dawn, is that your dad?”  
  
“No, it’s her SITTER,” another said nastily, and Dawn flushed.  
  
Spike regarded the girl as a general regards his worthy opponent, eyes narrowed, jaw clenched, “Janice,” he said.  
  
Dawn shook her arm out of the vampire’s grip. “We’re just hanging out. Isn’t that allowed? We aren’t drinking.” She held up her fist with the underage stamp on it.  
  
“No. You’ve been snogging.”  
  
Snickers from the girls. Dawn crossed her arms and tossed her hair. “You just made that word up.”  
  
“Yeah? Here’s another made-up word: grounded.”  
  
Dawn gasped loudly as he pushed her toward the exit. “I don’t believe this. You can’t ground me! You’re not…”  
  
She struggled to come up with a description of all the things Spike was not.  
  
He pulled her against the alleyway wall. “Bit, you are so lucky I have this chip. I can smell that boy all over you and I would make him hamburger.”  
  
Dawn’s eyes got big. “What boy?” Her voice broke in an attempt at false innocence.  
  
“The one you were rubbing your jailbait body all over. The one I’m fantasizing about murdering.”  
  
There was no mistaking the cold intent in his eyes. She wrapped her arms around herself. “When did the evil vampire become the virtue police? We barely kissed!”  
  
He grimaced and pushed her forward. “Home.”  
  
After they’d made it a block or so, she turned to look at him following her. He kept looking left and right as though just daring some big nasty to jump them. Big bad. Jealous? Of her? She almost smiled. “You really can just… smell a guy on me? I mean, we barely…”  
  
“Takes more than a ‘barely’ to smear ‘eau de teenage boy’ all over you like a gallon of cheap perfume.”  
  
Dawn squinted. “What do boys smell like?”  
  
“Goats, mostly,” he shrugged. “Horny goats in sweat-socks.”  
  
Dawn laughed for real then. “Wait, what do I smell like?”  
  
Spike stopped as though he’d walked into an invisible wall.  
  
“What?” Dawn asked.  
  
He shook his head. “You smell… like a girl.” He bit his lip. The pure virginal arousal, all flesh and cream, hot, untested, it was a beautiful smell. The specific scent of her sweat, her skin oil, all clean, all pure. Hot lemon acid and cocaine. How could he tell Dawn what she smelled like?  
  
“Well, come on! What do girls smell like? Girl goats?”  
  
He shrugged and resumed walking. “Most all of your smell is just ‘human’, you know: animal, meat, sweat.”  
  
“Wow. This is that famous vampire flattery I hear so much about.”  
  
“You’re kind of… peachy,” he said at last.  
  
“Not… glowing ball of energy-y?”  
  
He shook his head.  
  
They’d reached Revello. Dawn sighed, seeing her house and realizing another boring night IN awaited her – and how many more after it until she’d get to go out again? “Why do you care if I ‘snog’ anyway? And did you really not make that up?”  
  
“Perfectly normal people say ‘snog’ ‘t mean kissing,” Spike snapped. “And you’re too young.”  
  
“How old was Buffy when she lost it with Angel?”  
  
“Equal to his intellectual age,” Spike growled. “Which is too bloody young.”  
  
“How old where you when you lost it?”  
  
“Dead.” He quickened his pace toward the house.  
  
Dawn groaned. “Didn’t people get married when they were like eight when you were alive?”  
  
Without looking behind him, he said, “You just bought yourself another history book.”  
  
Dawn dragged her feet up the steps with a louder and more protracted groan. “Please not another Greek dude! I promise never to date!”  
  
***  
  
Two weeks and a horde of demon bikers later, Spike slammed the front door, whirling, hands up to see Dawn on the steps. “Thank God. You scared me half to death ... or more to death. You…!” He pointed at her, “I could kill you.”  
  
“Spike…”  
  
“I mean it. I could rip your head off one-handed and drink from your brain stem.”  
  
Dawn stepped aside, gesturing helplessly behind her. Buffy stood at the top of the steps, staring down at Spike with a glimmer of interest, the first Dawn had seen on her face since bringing her home. “Look.”  
  
“Yeah? I've seen the bloody bot before. Didn't think she'd patch up so…” Spike’s voice broke off, his jaw falling open.  
  
“She's kind of, um...” Dawn took her sister’s hand gingerly and led her down the steps. “She's been through a lot ... with the ... death. But I think she's okay. Spike? Are YOU okay?”  
  
“Her hands,” he said, taking Buffy’s hand gently from Dawn’s and turning it over, squinting at her torn knuckles.  
  
“I was gonna try to fix them… I don’t know what happened.”  
  
“I do… dug her way out of a coffin, didn’t you?” He looked into Buffy’s eyes.  
  
And she smiled.  
  
Awed, wet blue met glassy hazel, but she was smiling, a little, quiet smile like one of Dru’s old-fashioned dolls. Spike led her to the sofa and told Dawn to get first aid supplies.  
  
That glassiness made him worry, that look like her eyes weren’t deep enough to really be there, but he felt her heart beating, and could smell the very real, alive blood seeping from her knuckles, mixed with peaty grave earth and wood-splinters. He rubbed his thumb over an unbroken section of skin on the back of her hand.  
  
“Kiss it?” Buffy asked.  
  
He raised her fingertips to his lips, felt the jagged, broken edges of the nails one at a time and kissed the blood-tainted skin under each one. There was so much he wanted to tell her, but words couldn’t be uttered. She was alive. He couldn’t stop touching her hands, staring at her, confirming it to himself.  
  
Then the door burst open. “Is she here? Buffy! Buffy’s here! She’s here!”  
  
Voices overlapped, a babble like a flock of geese. Spike let go of Buffy’s hands to slip unobtrusively away, but her hard grip on his wrists stopped him.  
  
“Guys! Give her some room!” Dawn was pleading helplessly with the overwhelming joy crowd.  
  
“Stay,” Buffy said, and squeezed his wrists. Numbly, he nodded. He looked at the others, babbling and hugging. They didn’t see him, anyway.  
  
Smiling tentatively, not saying much of anything, Buffy let her friends draw her up and hold her. She was like precious porcelain – almost transparent. Brittle.  
  
Spike felt his heart shatter into pieces and reform as he watched her, as he fell helplessly even deeper in love, so unworthily given back what had been lost.  
  
Dawn felt like the only sober person at a party, struggling to keep Xander and Willow from overwhelming Buffy, then glancing back to Spike, who no longer saw anyone in the room BUT Buffy.  
  
And she realized: no one saw her there at all.


	3. Chapter 3

The excitement died down to quiet awe – it was strangely similar to the speechless, awkward socializing at Buffy’s funeral, but of course, happier.

Willow showed Buffy how she and Tara had moved in to Joyce’s old room, but Buffy’s room was exactly as she’d left it.

Xander had reluctantly gone home.

Spike stood next to the door, contemplating his first night in the crypt in a long time. All he could think about was how cold it was in the crypt, how the air was always a little damp and smelled of decay.

Dawn came half-way down the steps and sat down. “You’re leaving?”

He shrugged. “Got your sis back. You don’t need me anymore.”

“But she’s all… weird.” Dawn gestured over her head. “Buffy’s going to need adjustment. Time. Backup sister watching.”

Spike smiled. “If it’s all right with her, pet.”

“Well don’t slink out into the night all secret! Ask her!”

As if summoned, Buffy appeared at the top of the stairs. “You’re leaving?”

“Um… well…” he looked over his shoulder at the door.

Buffy walked down the steps, past Dawn. “I didn’t want you to leave.”

“Then I won’t!” He shrugged out of his coat and smiled a bit too cheerily.

Willow, from the top of the stairs, saw Buffy looking strangely at a half-coated Spike and got the wrong impression. “Oh. He… Buffy, Spike doesn’t have to stay if you don’t want. It’s just he’s been a big help, our de-facto Dawnsitter, mostly daytimes because Tara and me have school, but at night Tara watches because Spike and I… well… slay.” She hurried to stand on the same step Dawn was seated on. “Not that any of that has to stop, either, or has to go on… we’re all here to help you any way you want in the whole slaying and Dawn-sitting thing…” Willow looked down at Dawn. “I’m babbling, aren’t I?”

Dawn patted Willow’s calf. “Like a pro. Classic, vintage Willowbabble.”

Buffy pushed the coat the rest of the way down Spike’s arms. “Stay,” she said.

He nodded mutely, letting her remove the coat and toss it aside. She took his hand and pulled him toward the stairs.

“Where are we going, then?” he asked.

Willow and Dawn exchanged confused looks. “Buffy?” Dawn stood as her sister got close to her step and it looked like there would be no room for all of them together.

“I don’t want to be alone,” Buffy said.

“You’re not!” Willow stumbled against the banister to get out of the way as Buffy led Spike up the stairs.

She took the vampire to her bedroom and closed the door behind them.

Dawn gaped. Willow gaped. Dawn and Willow turned and gaped at each other.

Willow swallowed against a dry mouth. “I guess… death puts things in perspective for a girl.”

***

Spike didn’t say anything. He barely moved, afraid at any moment he was going to ruin it all, shatter the paper-thin illusion that Buffy was actually touching him, looking at him with desire.

He simply didn’t believe it when she took off her shirt, or when she pulled his off over his head. And when her steady advance had him backed against the bed, he just wrinkled his brow and stared.

“I feel hollow,” Buffy answered his unasked question. “I feel empty and cold and… muffled.” Her fingers were cold, not unpleasantly so on a man with no body heat. Her broken fingernails caught against his sides. “Like I’m not really feeling anything.”

He picked her roaming hands off his skin, raised them to kiss. “What was it like, where you were?”

Her slightly vacant expression hardened into sudden anger. With her full strength she pushed him. He fell and slid up the bed, hitting his head on the wrought metal headboard.

She landed on top of him with an impact that drove the last air from his lungs. She grabbed his hair and jerked his head up toward hers. “It was heaven,” she said, and her voice broke. She threw him down again. “Take me back.”

Head still ringing from two impacts, Spike was further dazed, undone, by the loss and pain in Buffy’s expression. He raised a shaking hand to her cheek and nodded. “Whatever you want, love. Whatever I can do.”

And then she was kissing him ravenously. Starving kisses, thirsty kisses sucking up moisture into a dry mouth.

He told the corner of his mind that was cringing, waiting for the other boot to fall, to fuck off. He met her kiss for kiss and battled to divest them both of clothes, to make love like it could end the world.

There was no care or concern for noise, for the sanctity of the walls, or even for each other. Buffy seemed unhinged, violent, and when he looked into her eyes, he didn’t think she was seeing him. But she shuddered and gripped him harder as he pressed into her, and her hands and body warmed and became slick with sweat. She gasped and closed her eyes and started to look alive again, to feel hot, her heart beating hard enough to jump from her skin.

And he thought, after she screamed her release, fingernails gouging uneven tracks on his hips, her eyes opened and the glassiness was gone.

He kissed her tenderly and kept making love to her, now she was pliant, soft, unresisting. He kissed and worked slowly until they both came to a quieter release and fell, together, into exhausted sleep.

***

Dawn, Willow and Tara came home the next morning from an impromptu sleepover at Xander and Anya’s. They were all a little sore from the lack of proper beds, though getting breakfast as a group at the local diner had helped with feeling cranky. Tara went straight to the shower.

Dawn found Buffy in the dinning room, flipping through the haphazard leaf-pile of papers on the table. “What’s this?” she asked, holding up a scrap for Dawn to see.

Dawn squinted. “That one says ‘Han shot first.’ Actually, it’s ‘Han the solitary was the first shooter’. I’m still working on getting it right.”

Buffy’s expression showed even more confusion. She dropped the paper. “And this?”

“Oh – that’s one of Spike’s. ‘Latin is a language dead as can be, first it killed the Romans, now it’s killing me.’” Dawn smiled. “Spike’s been teaching me Latin. We were trading sentences because that Herodorkus guy is sooooo boring.”

Buffy let the leaf fall. She walked around the table, examining everything. She picked up a book from the sideboard – it was one of Willow’s.

“Are you okay, Buffy?”

She shook her head. “I’m not sure… it…” She put the book down and ran her hand over it. “Everything’s the same.”

“You were only gone for… for a couple months.”

“It felt longer,” Buffy said. She wandered into the kitchen, still stopping and touching everything.

Spike came up from the basement, balancing two laundry baskets and nearly dumping them as he wrangled them through the doorframe. “Bit! There you are! Give a hand. Gotta get this place looking like grown-ups live here.”

Dawn shrieked in fear as the top basket nearly fell on her as she reached for it. Somehow she got it and followed Spike into the living room. “Do you even know what you’re doing?”

“When I last had a house to worry about, I had servants.” He tossed the laundry basket onto the couch.

“Omigaw, really? Were you super rich?”

Spike rolled his eyes. “Pet, in those days not havin’ servants was like… like not havin’ cable!” He spilled the clothes out on the sofa cushions and frowned at them. “Bloody hell, are these Tara’s or Willow’s?”

“You can’t smell?”

“Smells like soap. Guess I’ll just dump them out on their bed, let the witches figure it out.” He shoved the clothes back into the basket.

Buffy slipped into the room, looking like a ghost. “Spike?”

He immediately dropped what he was doing and went to her, hands out. “Everything okay, petal?”

Buffy shook her head. He wrapped his arms around her and started swaying, like they were dancing. She laid her head on his shoulder.

Dawn’s cheerful mood turned sour in her mouth. She picked up her basket and headed to the stairs. “I’ll be in my room if anyone needs me. If anyone remembers I exist.”

“You’re going to be okay,” Spike whispered to Buffy, one hand smoothing her hair as they rocked together in the entryway.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: here's where it starts to get dark. I was asked for dark, and that's what this fic is going to be.

“I should be happy,” Dawn said while Xander drove her home from school. “I mean… Spike’s been gaga over Buffy for years now and she’s finally returning the feeling and I love them both so…” she picked at her seatbelt, “I should be happy.”

“You should be pouring honey in her sock drawer,” Xander replied. He glanced at her briefly before turning on to Revello. “Or ‘accidentally’ putting her delicate whites in hot water with your jeans.”

Dawn laughed. “Wow. THAT wasn’t the reaction I expected from you.”

Xander shrugged. “You have a thing for Spike. Your big sister, who gets all the attention anyway, has stolen your man. I say an all-out prank war is called for.”

Dawn wanted to keep laughing, but something about the hardness of Xander’s expression stopped her. “Is everything all right?” she asked.

Xander pulled into the drive. He turned the car off with an emphatic twist and turned to face her. “Dawnie, my best friend arose from the dead two days ago, and none of us got a day off out of it. Everyone’s acting like we can just go back to what we were doing! I’m not in the same county as ‘fine’.”

“But… you’re happy?”

“That Buffy pushed the rest of us out the door to shack up with Spike her first night back? Thrilled. Also stocking up on honey and barf-flavored candy.”

Then he smiled, and was just plain old Xander again. Dawn smiled back. “Are you coming in?”

“Nah. Gotta pretend normal life goes on. But Ahn and me’ll be around for dinner.”

Dawn found Buffy in the dining room, looking over a lot of papers. She had a glass of milk and her hair was all pulled back into a scrunchie. She looked up as Dawn entered and smiled a normal smile. “Hey you. How was school?”

Dawn set her backpack in one of the dining chairs. “Buffy, you look great! I mean, you sound normal and everything.”

Buffy winced at that, but her smile returned with only slightly diminished brightness. “I feel better. You just have to… have to accept, and move on. I’m… better. Right now.” She pushed papers around on the table as though trying to line them up and form a puzzle picture. “Trying to figure out what needs to be done. There’s bills, and there’s school… reapplying. There’s…” she picked one paper up. “Concerned family members?”

Dawn glanced over her sister’s shoulder. “That’s not concerned. That’s dad’s lawyer making sure he doesn’t get sued for grossly not doing anything.”

Buffy grimaced and shoved the paper under a pile. “Joy. The great thing about being dead? No paperwork.”

Dawn hugged her sister and together they cleared the papers so diner could be served. It was good, and Dawn felt herself softening toward her sister: no prank-a-thon plans at all. Things were good, she decided. More than good. Maybe that was the only problem – they were all so used to life sucking that this unexpected good left them feeling like they were walking on eggshells.

It didn’t even occur to Dawn to ask where Spike was.

She assumed he’d gone home or to the liquor store or to one of the many places Spike went when he just wanted to be alone or, as he put it, “Stop socializing with the food.”

The next morning she couldn’t find the sweater she wanted to wear. (She and Janice had matching sweaters and they’d talked about wearing them together that day and being twins.) It hadn’t been in her closet so she went down to the basement to see if it was in the laundry.

Something moved in the darkness under the steps and she screamed, dropping the sweater.

A pale head appeared in the limited light and she relaxed. “Spike. You scared the bejeebus out of me.” She picked up her sweater and examined it for floor-cooties.

“I scared you? Screamed me nearly out of my skin,” he said. “What time is it? You aren’t late, are you?”

There was a strange, rasping noise. Dawn, frowning, switched on the overhead light and gasped.

“Don’t you dare scream again,” Spike warned, one hand shielding his eyes.

A chain depended from his wrist, and as he moved she recognized the rasping noise. The chain looped around one of the basement steps, and dragged across the wood.

He was sitting on the floor with nothing to cover his nakedness but the plaid flannel throw they sometimes tucked around the base of the Christmas tree. He was also bruised – uneven splotches of red-brown showing starkly on his pale chest, arms, and face.

“What happened?” Dawn ran to him. She reached for the chain.

Spike yanked his arm back from her. “Leave it.”

“What? You’re…. who did this?”

“Just leave it. Was my fault.” He looked away from her, holding his chained wrist as far back as he could. “You get to school. This’ll all be cleared up by the time you get home.” He added in a quieter voice, “Probably.”

“Wait… you want me to just leave you here? I’m getting Buffy.” Dawn threw her sweater at the dryer, all concern for matching outfits day forgotten.

“NO!” The rasp was joined by a jingle as Spike jumped up. “You’ll only make her upset.” Dawn stopped, squinting at him in confusion. “I don’t think she wanted you to know about this,” he said.

Dawn slowly backed away. “No. This is crazy.”

“Look, it’s my fault,” he calmly explained, like he would when she’d failed to understand a paragraph in Latin. “I tried to leave. She told me to stay. She’s at a vulnerable time. She felt abandoned. I shouldn’t have tried to leave.”

He was holding the plaid blanket in one hand, gesturing with his chained wrist. Dawn shook her head and ran up the stairs.

“Don’t forget to go to school!” he shouted after her.

Buffy was in the kitchen buttering toast. Dawn stood at the top of the basement steps. “Spike’s chained up down there,” she said. It sounded even crazier than it was. She stepped aside and pointed down the stairs.

Buffy set down the butter-knife. “He’s being punished.” She shrugged and bit into her toast.

“Punished? But…” Dawn took a step into the kitchen and looked from her sister to the open basement door. “YOU did that?”

“Please. It’s nothing. I was going to unchain him after breakfast.”

“Why… why would you do that?” Dawn blinked. “What if you decide to punish me? What then?”

“Dawnie!” Buffy set down her toast. “Don’t be silly. You’d never do anything to make me want to chain you up.”

Dawn backed away from her sister. “I have to go to school,” she said, and hurried from the room.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: The darkness is mitigated with some seriously silly business that I cannot be held responsible for. I must have been tipsy when I wrote this.

Dawn considered, silently, unnerved, discussing the weirdness of the morning with Xander as he drove her to school. But no matter how she rehearsed the words in her head, she just couldn’t bring herself to say them. Besides, Xander was looking cold, absent, like he wasn’t really seeing her.

“Janice is going to walk home with me,” she said as she jumped out of the car. “So no need to pick me up tonight, okay?”

Xander smiled for the first time all morning. “Okay kiddo. Be safe.”

When she got home, there were strange noises coming from the kitchen, and not wanting to have yet another sanity-challenging run-in with her sister or Spike, Dawn hurried upstairs to her room.

The door to Willow and Tara’s room was open, and Dawn could hear Tara softly crying.

“Tara?” Dawn slipped through the door to the cozy master bedroom.

Tara looked up, eyes red-rimmed. She was standing over a suitcase on the bed, folding a dress. “Oh. Dawnie.” She sniffled and rubbed the heel of her hand up under her eyes as though she could force the tears back up, under her lids. “I… I didn’t know you were home.”

“Is everything all right?”

Tara shook her head. “I’m going away, Dawnie. Just… not forever, I mean, I’m moving out. I can’t stay here right now.”

Dawn sat on the edge of the bed. “Is this… is this about the fight you and Willow had?”

Tara smiled and sniffled. “Yes,” she said, and then her face wrinkled and she turned away, unable to look at Dawn’s sweet face, remembering how Dawn had so innocently alerted her to her lover’s betrayal.

Not looking at Dawn, she was able to finish folding the dress in her hands. A summer dress. Willow had said she looked like a sexy fairy princess in this dress. “Willow… and I had a f-fight. And she made m-me. M-made…” Tara dropped the dress into the suitcase and pressed it down, though she didn’t need to for room, yet. “She made me forget.” She bravely raised her eyes to Dawn’s. “I don’t think it was the first time, either. So you see, I can’t stay.”

Tara’s warm arms took Dawn in a soft hug and they cried together for a long time.

Spike met Dawn at the base of the stairs, looking comically wild with white baking flour all over his face and shirt. “Niblet! Thank god you’re home. I need your help. What the soddin’ hell is a ‘Tisp’?”

Feeling hollow-headed and sore-eyed after her crying fit with Tara, not to mention emotionally fragile, Dawn almost felt her mind crack at this sudden apparition: a frantic, but clearly untraumatized Spike, fully clothed, unchained. “You’re out of the basement.”

“’Course I am. Told you it’d sort itself out. Now come on, I’m running out of time and the damn thing’s written in code or something!” He grabbed her arm and dragged her toward the kitchen. “Slayer asked me to cook dinner. I looked through the book until I found something we had all the ingredients for, and I start on my merry way when suddenly everything is in ‘tisps’ and ‘tibbles’.”

Dawn squinted, slowly realizing. “Teaspoons?”

The kitchen was a mess, every sort of gadget and bowl out on the counters and flour everywhere. Spike sighed and planted his hands on either side of an open copy of “The Joy of Cooking”. His shoulders sagged in defeat. “Bollocks. You don’t have any decent tea-things at all.”

“It’s a unit of measure.” Dawn felt her tear-streaked cheeks crinkle like tissue paper as she smiled. She opened the junk drawer and got out the measuring spoons. “See? Teaspoon. Tablespoon.” She jangled them.

He glared indignantly and plucked the ring of metal spoons from her grasp.

Dawn leaned over and looked at the cook-book page that was open. “Spike… I can’t believe that I’m the one saying this, but you can’t make us cookies for dinner.”

He was carefully pouring vanilla into the teaspoon and looked up at her with a quizzical expression. “Why the hell not? It’s about the only thing you had all the stuff for!”

“Yeah, because no one bakes since…” Dawn bit her lip. She couldn’t quite say “Mom died”. Even now.

Spike went back to consulting the recipe, shaking salt from the table-shaker into a measuring spoon. “No point backtracking now. Slayer wanted a home-cooked meal by six and I used up a bleedin’ hour reading before I even got to the tisp problem. Don’t want the Slayer getting upset. She’s in a fragile state!”

It was close to what he’d said that morning, chained under the basement stairs. Dawn felt a queasy lunge in her stomach. “And you don’t want Buffy to be upset.”

Spike knit his brows. “Hey now, I don’t like that tone. Your sister’s been through a lot, Niblet. More than you or I can understand, and I’ve DIED already.”

Dawn glanced around, wrenching her fingers. “What’s going to happen when Buffy gets home and finds the place a mess like this?”

“Don’t know.” Spike was still a moment. He shook his head. “Where’s the baking powder? Had it a second ago…” He pushed boxes and bowls out of his way until he’d retrieved the little red canister. He didn’t look at Dawn as he opened it and measured out a teaspoon. “Look, I know Buffy’s acting… well, she’s not the same. But it’ll probably blow over and to be honest, I hope it doesn’t.” He dropped a spoonful of powder into the mixing bowl. “I mean, she’s letting me DO things for her.” He gestured around the room with the measuring spoon. “She’s let me IN. I know she doesn’t love me but she LIKES me and to be honest, that’s more than I’ve had in a long time and I’m taking it. Basements and beatings be damned.”

Dawn's voice was barely a whisper, “I like you.”

“I’m talking boy-girl like, Bit.” He turned and tossed the spoons in the sink.

Dawn felt her stomach drop into her shoes. She left the room before she could hear him say anything else.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This segment entirely **dreamsofspike** 's fault!!

Buffy got into the car with Xander at the end of the workday. She smelled like sawdust and plaster and held the still shiny-new yellow hard hat on her lap. “Do you think they’ll blame ME for the demons showing up?”

Xander paused in pulling his seatbelt out. He sighed and finished fastening it. “It doesn’t look good, Buff. If I was the boss, we could swing something. But…”

They both fell silent as he started the car and pulled out of the construction lot.

“It’s like some malevolent force is keeping me from ever getting a job!”

Xander grimaced as he palmed the steering wheel, circling the construction site fence on the way back to the main road.

“What?” Buffy asked.

He shook his head. “What nothing, Buff. Demons showing up on your first day? Anyone who wasn’t a slayer, I’d say bad luck.”

“But since I’m the slayer, I should just accept this and let my house get taken away?”

Xander flattened his hands against the steering wheel. “Well, how about making fangless pay rent, since you’re letting him darken your door?”

Buffy turned to her friend with raised eyebrows. “Wow. Try that again with just a hint more bitter?”

“You know how I feel about him,” Xander said. “He’s unrepentant evil, Buff. And you let him hang with Dawnie. Alone.”

“Spike can’t hurt Dawn, Xan.”

“No. He can’t HIT Dawn. Doesn’t mean he can hurt her. There are lots of ways to hurt someone. Believe me. My parents have PhDs in passive aggression.” He turned onto Revello. “And speaking of people who should never, ever have gotten together in the first place…”

“Spike and I aren’t ‘together’.”

“Really? Buff, I saw you, much as I am loathe to admit it and am still trying to banish the memory. Dawn said she heard you get to know each other biblically.”

Buffy shrugged, one hand playing over the top of the car door. “It was this look he gave me. I was so empty, after I… after I got home again. And he was there and he was holding my hand and looking at me in this totally unguarded way. It just hit me. He’ll do anything I ask, and expect nothing in return.”

They’d reached Buffy’s house. Xander slammed into park and yanked the brake up with more force than necessary. “So you decided, ‘gee, evil dead deserves some loving’?”

“No!” Buffy almost laughed. “I mean… I just thought… what the heck am I fighting this for? Someone gives you a gift; you take it, don’t you? I just never noticed before, that when he said he loved me, what he meant was, he gave himself to me.” She undid her seatbelt and turned to face Xander. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? He doesn’t even know what he feels isn’t love. It’s surrender. He knows I’m better than him.”

Xander’s face was unreadable. He glared at his own hand on the parking brake, seeming to will away the conversation. “I don’t like it,” he said at last. He raised his eyes to hers. “He’s a corpse, Buff.”

“Ew! ANIMATED corpse. That makes a big difference.” Buffy slipped out of the car. “Come on, Xander. Let’s not fight. I don’t know about you, but after that fun-filled day I am looking forward to a hot, home-cooked meal and a shower.”

Xander felt consideration for hot meal battling with the ‘vampire doing Buffy’ anger and strangely winning. Anya was wonderful, but she was no Betty Crocker. He’d been subsisting on microwave and take-out since… alas, since leaving the wonders of Sunnydale High cafeteria behind. And wasn’t it just another straw on his back that cafeteria food was the last good cooking he could remember?

So he got out of the car and followed Buffy to the back door of the Summers’ home.

And not very far into the kitchen. Buffy stopped dead in her tracks one foot inside the door.

“What did you do?”

Spike was frozen in the door to the dinning room. “You’re early,” he said.

“Demon attack. Another fun-filled day on the hellmouth,” Xander said with forced cheer. “Buff?”

Spike hurried to the center island and started gathering up bowls and implements. “It’s… I…”

Buffy walked slowly to the oven. She opened the door. A pleasant odor wafted up. Sugar cookies spread wetly on a baking sheet. She flicked the oven door closed with a bang. “Where’s dinner?”

“That’s the second batch,” he said, dumping an armload of dishware into the sink. “Dawn said it wasn’t enough for dinner, so I’m working up something else. It’s just…” He reached for a mixing bowl.

“No dinner sucks, but, hey! Cookies!” Xander said, and went straight to the cooling rack where batch one sat.

Buffy turned back to the oven. She wrenched each of the knobs on the stove top, turning all the burners on.

“Buffy?” Spike asked, looking from the mess on the center island to Xander with a cookie half in mouth and then back to Buffy, who seemed interested only in watching the electric coil burners start to glow.

“Come here,” she said.

He set down the mixing bowl and approached her slowly. “I don’t know how to cook, love,” he said. “I… should have…”

“Hands.” Buffy said, holding hers out.

Frowning in confusion, he extended his hands to her.

Buffy took hold of both his wrists. “Don’t fight,” she said. With a swift turn, she pressed his palms to the two front burners.

He was too surprised to shout, only an inappropriately comic “Ah!” coming out of his lips.

“Don’t fight,” she repeated.

He squirmed anyway, twisting in her grasp. His boots squeaked on the linoleum as they struggled together. Her fingers were white with strain, his arched up like spider legs. “What… what are you… Buffy! I’ll dust!”

“No you won’t. It’s not fire. It’s the stove. Where hot meals are cooked. On the stove.” She said as she pressed down twice more, hard, and then released him. He staggered back, looking at her in disbelief as he curled his wounded hands to his chest.

Xander swallowed the lump of cookie in his throat.

“Now clean this up. Xander, get Dawn. We’ll go out to eat.” She turned each of the burners off and continued talking mostly to herself. “God, Spike. I can’t afford to eat out any more and you know that. How could you be a hundred years old and still so stupid?”

Spike looked at his hands. They were red, the spiral-pattern of the metal burner marked in white and rising already into blisters. He slumped against the sink and stared at her, incredulous, as she set her hard hat and lunch box on the baking rack next to the cookies.

“I mean it, Spike,” she said. “This had better all be clean by the time we get back. I’m just going to change out of these clothes real quick. Oh, Xander? Ask Dawnie where she wants to go.”

Xander nodded and put down what was left of his cookie. But he just stood there until they heard Buffy running up the stairs. “Wow,” he said. “Sucks to be you.”

Spike straightened. “She’s going through a hard time,” he said. He reached for the faucet and winced. Three times he fumbled with the knob for the cold water, his fingertips sliding off of it as he flinched.

Xander watched Spike use his forearms to turn on the cold water and rinse his burned hands. “You’re not supposed to do that,” he said, “Just makes it blister worse.”

“Either be some help or sod off, Harris,” Spike growled, followed by some hisses and yelps of pain as he tried to turn the water back off again.

Xander wiped cookie-crumbs from his hands. “Fine. Dick.” He followed Buffy up the stairs.

Spike held his hands in front of him like a surgeon waiting for his gloves and surveyed the mess in the room. The cookbook, the flour, the canisters and the spoons and mixer… all that would need his hands to touch. Softly, to himself, he repeated, “She’s going through a bad time, that’s all.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: kind of a transition chapter, and remember, please, that the Scoobies are going bug-shaggin' crazy in this story. Got that? NUTS. Okay, now on to the chapter:

Dawn paced in her room. Since hearing Xander’s car pull up she was torn between wanting to go downstairs and not wanting to. Staying in her room was supposed to save her from having to see and hear Buffy blow up, but how was that useful when all she could do is wait to hear it anyway?

She stopped and listened intently. There was no screaming, no shouting, no banging. Maybe it was all right? She heard voices, maybe a little clatter and an “ow.”

Footsteps on the stairs. She hugged herself tight.

Footsteps continued on past her room. The bathroom door opened and closed. She peeked out.

Xander came up the stairs. “Hey, Dawnie,” he said, “We’re going out to eat. What do you feel like? Chicken?”

Dawn hesitantly stepped into the hallway. “Did Buffy go totally ballistic?”

“Oh yeah. So I take it you knew about the flour-party in the kitchen?”

***

Dawn slipped by Xander after a noncommittal grunt about chicken and hurried down to the kitchen to check on Spike.

There was a crash and she ran.

Spike was shaking his hands and muttering “fuck fuck fuck” over an up-ended mixing bowl.

“Are you okay?”

He gave her a contemptuous glare while sucking on the flesh between his thumb and forefinger. “No. But I’m managing. Get out before big sis catches you.”

She watched him gingerly handle the mixing bowl as though it was red-hot, bouncing it from the side of one hand to the inside of the other wrist all the way to the sink. “Catches me doing what?”

“I dunno. Look, I have some experience dealing with the unreasonable, all right? She’s not going to like you in here with me. And we’re not going to like… her… not liking.” He waved an arm at her and continued juggling items off the counter and into the sink with his fingertips.

“Wait… what’s up with your hands?”

Spike sighed. He leaned against his forearms on the sink-edge. “Niblet, they’re burned. Now go. Buffy’s new to this… this psycho punishment routine, but I’m not. They set up an impossible task, right? You gotta do it, or at least pretend you can do it, try your best, and help isn’t allowed. Ever.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Would you just trust the hundred-year-old and go!”

“Dawnie?”

She turned to see Xander in the door, holding her coat. “Come on, everyone in the Xandermobile.”

She kept staring at Spike, his back sagging against the sink, as Xander dragged her out into the night.

***

Dawn felt like a prisoner, trapped between Xander and Buffy at Mr. Chicken. The bright lights, the food, the smiles and light banter between friends, it all looked normal, but it wasn’t, like some creepy twilight zone episode where you find out at the end everyone is eating babies or something.

“Where’s Anya?” she asked, breaking into a forcibly upbeat conversation on the subject of what movies and tv shows Buffy had missed while dead.

They both looked at her like she was talking Greek.

“Anya?” she repeated. “Your girlfriend? I thought you were living together. Is she getting dinner somewhere else?”

Xander pushed coleslaw around with his fork. “Getting Anya dinner every day isn’t my responsibility,” he said.

She’d never seen Xander look so cold. Dawn sank back in the plastic booth, no longer having appetite enough even for fried chicken.

***

The timer beeped while Spike was manuvering a cookie sheet into the sink, which was rapidly becoming over-full and so the operation felt like a final level of Tetris.

He didn’t even remember what the beep was for until it repeated, more urgently. “Bugger. Cookies.” The baking sheet fell to the floor with a loud bang and he ran to the oven.

Retrieving the last batch of cookies went like this: Twist off knob. Howl at pain. Open door. Shake hand out and jump up and down in pain. Reach into oven with bare hand. Stop, bite forearm to stop scream, accidentally puncture self, repeat, grab oven mitts. Dance around like lunatic sliding wounded hands into, apparently, concrete-and-razor lined oven mitts. Reach into oven. Feel heat awaken each millimeter of burn like it is brand-new. Bang shin on oven-door. Repeat. Screw up courage, grab the bloody thing and fling it at the counter in quickest-possible move, scattering cookies.

At least some of them stuck to the pan.

Spike kicked the oven closed, threw the oven mitts viciously into the wall and indulged in a few seconds of unabridged cursing.

After that, things went smoother. The trick was not to use his palms – to pretend his hands were wooden, unable to bend, and then just balance everything on the fingertips. Actually washing the dishes was going to be something of an exercise in agony, but he got them all in the sink, at least, and the cookbook put away and the counter cleared, which made the kitchen look a lot cleaner than it actually was.

He was wiping the last four off the counter, pushing a rag around with his elbow – when Tara came in the back door. “Oh,” she said, smiling, “Hi Spike. I didn’t…” she pointed to the door and back to him. “I didn’t let too much sun in, did I?”

Spike frowned. “It’s dark out, love.”

She turned and looked out the window. “Oh.” She brushed a smooth fall of blonde hair back from her face and grimaced. “I… I’m forgetting things lately.”

Spike rubbed his wet elbow on his t-shirt. “Thought you split, Glinda. What are you doing back here?”

Tara looked even more confused. “I live here. With Willow.”

“Nooo… you left Willow. Remember? Bint had the gall to mess with your mind. We all support you, luv….”

“I love Willow,” Tara snapped.

Spike fell back from her glare. “Glinda?”

“I love Willow,” she said again, face practically vibrating with passion. “And I’ll never leave her. Ever.” Tara’s face fell, and she suddenly shivered, curling her arms around herself. Her voice became soft, more like her usual tones. “What’s happening to me?”

Spike took a step forward, extending a hand, but she cringed and ran deeper into the house.

Spike stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking from the still-open back door to the direction Tara had run. “Well fuck,” he said.

***

Giles awoke to an incessant banging. Knock, knock, knockknockknock KICK.

“Coming! Coming!” He blearily felt along the wall for the light switch and pulled the door open against the chain-lock.

The sight of Dawn on his doorstep at two in the morning was enough to wake him. Her face was tear-streaked and she was shifting nervously from foot to foot. “Mr. Giles? Can I come in? Something is really, really wrong.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back in the saddle and as angsty and Spike-torturing as ever!

Tara and Willow’s room was dark, none of their scented candles lit. Tara’s hair was lit only by the streetlight coming in from the front window, where she crouched, a hand on the sill.

The door creaked as Spike nudged it open. “Glinda? Tara, pet, what happened?”

Tara laid her cheek on the wooden sill. “E-everything’s fuzzy. I just know I love Willow and I h-had to come back.”

Spike tred carefully, as though the floor was spread with broken glass. “You’ve been magicked, Glinda. No two ways about it.”

“Stop saying that!” She winced and covered her face with her hands. “I-it feels wrong.”

Spike crouched beside the good witch, unsure what to do. He reached out at touched her arm with just his fingertips. When she didn’t move, he scooted closer, petting her shoulder and arm, little soothing touches like you’d give a frightened animal, with just the tips of his fingers, where he wasn’t burnt. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” he said, resting his head near hers on the sill. “We’re gonna get you cleaned up, yeah? Wash those tears off your cheeks, and then…”

“Get away from her!”

Spike turned to see Willow in the doorway, leaning forward, her mouth open. “Now!” she repeated. “What are you doing? You’re scaring her!”

“I’M scaring her!” Spike stood, brows pressed tightly together.

Willow barreled past him, falling to throw her arms around Tara. “It’s okay, baby.”

Spike scowled at the little redhead’s back. “Fine.” He threw his hands in the air. “I tried. God, I’m supposed to be the evil one here. Crazy bi...”

Buffy stood in the doorway, exactly where Willow had been a moment before.

***

“Buffy’s been acting weird. Super weird. Came-back-without-a-soul weird. Is that it? I mean… could they have resurrected her evil somehow? Is this one of those ‘things man was not meant to know’ deals? Giles! OMG, what if it is? Am I going to have to kill my sister?”

Being woken so soon after going to bed for the night, Giles did not have the mental capacity to keep up with the teenager’s babbling, much less the physical energy to follow her mad pacing up and down his front room. “I find that possibility highly unlikely… could you stand still for a minute?”

She whirled in place, throwing her hands out. “What am I supposed to do? Buffy’s going to notice I snuck away. At least I HOPE she does… okay, not really.”

Giles rubbed his forehead. “I’m a little dizzy from following the logic of that sentence. Dawn… before I tell you you’re over-reacting and kick you out…”

“I’m not over-reacting! You didn’t see it! She BURNED him.”

Giles sighed. “As I said, before I leap to any conclusions, why don’t you tell me what ‘weird’ things your sister has been doing? Has she threatened you?”

“Sort of.” Dawn threw herself down on the couch next to Giles, causing the whole cushion to shift. He had to flail a bit to resume his forehead rubbing. “She’s doing things to Spike.”

“’Things?’ How I love the younger generation and their clarity of speech.” He stood and walked to the kitchen.

Dawn followed him, leaning against the door-frame while Giles got a glass of water. “I mean hurting him. She chained him up in the basement. I mean, seriously chained and beat up, like, I don’t know, like you’d expect the big bad to do. Something Glory would have done.”

Giles sat against the sink-edge and drank his water, frowning. “Disturbing bondage pictures aside, Buffy has an understandable tendency toward violence, particularly where vampires are concerned.”

“You think I’ve never seen Buffy pop Spike in the nose? It’s like, the punctuation on every conversation they have. But this is different, Giles, and I think it’s affecting Xander too. They’ve both been acting creepy.”

Giles blinked rapidly. “Yes, well…”

Dawn folded her arms. “I don’t feel safe,” she said.

Giles felt like he’d been sucker-punched. He set down his glass. “You’ll stay the night here,” he said. “We… we’ll figure it out in the morning.”

He soon had an armful of grateful Dawn, squeezing the life out of him. “Thanks, Giles. You won’t regret this.”

“I assure you I already do.” He patted her back. “Let’s get the couch turned down. Come on.”

***

Spike knew he looked foolish, mouth hanging open, frozen in place. His first, instinctive reaction was that some monster had erected an evil person-you-don’t-want-to-see spawning device in the bedroom doorway.

Buffy didn’t say anything. She turned deliberately to put her back to the bedroom door, looking pointedly down the hall. Spike took the hint and walked hurriedly past her. She followed him down the stairs and into the kitchen. He kept glancing back at her, waiting to hear it, to hear something. She just watched him, arms still folded in exactly the posture she had held when he first saw her at the bedroom door. He finished cleaning up the kitchen. There hadn’t been much left, really, and his skin was healing. He grit his teeth against the pain and let his blisters break and bleed while he finished the dishes. When he was done, she told him she was angry.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“You know,” she said.

Spike nodded. He walked down to the cellar and sat on the small cot. After a few minutes he picked up the chains and set them on the bed, near him. To be handy. Not, he reflected, that they were really all that necessary. He was more a prisoner of his own accord than anything else. They weren’t manacles, not designed for this sort of thing – just some leftover chain from somewhere, looped and tied on itself.

And he, evil as he was, felt like the only hope for good in Sunnydale. How fucking pathetic was that?

He took a deep breath, eyes on the rusty chains. Upstairs, he heard Buffy moving about. There was no movement from the two witches. Probably already asleep in each other’s arms. Lord knew what Red was playing at.

Maybe, he thought, he’d talk to Buffy about that. She was sure to know what to do. Go all after-school special on her magic-abusing chum.

Once she calmed down, he amended, hearing the first creek of her boots on the basement stairs.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Really, I'm so silly. Meant to have this up days ago but I had a momentary attack of the "Eek it's not good enough"s and that's silly. Just writing for fun, right?

Buffy stopped at the base of the basement stairs, one hand on the rail. She looked at Spike as though surprised to find him there.

He flexed his hands, just to wake up the sting. “How you want to do this, then?” he asked.

“Do what?”

He pursed his lips and tilted his head coyly, an expression designed to infuriate. It did. The stair rail groaned as Buffy let go of it. “What do you think this is?”

“Been a bad boy, haven’t I?” The tip of his tongue appeared against his teeth. “Gonna spank me?”

“Is this a joke to you? Am I a JOKE?”

His insouciant pout vanished. “No. No, Love. Just… come on, we both know…”

Her backhand threw his head against the cinder-block wall. It made such a hollow sound, he touched his skull fearfully. “Buffy…”

“You think this some sort of kinky sex game?”

“No, I…”

She smacked him in the other direction. He smiled ruefully as he caught himself against the wooden stair risers. “Well, at least you’re keeping me even. ‘Preciate that.”

She grabbed the front of his t-shirt and crawled onto the cot, slamming him into the wall. His smile sputtered and went out like a candle. Soft hopes, half-formed plans to steer this tête-à-tête vanished. He remembered her that first night, stopping him at the door, throwing him across the room as she screamed at him for abandoning her. She’d looked like this: hair sticking to her sweating cheeks, eyes wide, nostrils flared. Mercy and higher feeling crowded out of her eyes by rage.

She pushed him against the wall. “Is this a game?”

“No. It’s not.”

She slammed him one more time and let go. She didn’t move away. Spike spread his arms against the wall.

Buffy tilted her head. “Can you tell me why we’re doing this?”

He almost smiled, but stopped himself. “You’re angry. I didn’t get the kitchen fixed up.”

Buffy blinked. “You think this is about the kitchen?”

Spike frowned. “Innit?”

She had him by the shirt-front again and he made a silent prayer to the god of seams because he was down to only three intact shirts.

“Tell me what it’s about.”

“Wha? Luv…”

Another shake. The sound of stitches starting to pop and a renewed agony on the back of his skull. You wouldn’t think each hit would have its own particular feel, nuance of pain. Thud.

“Buffy, love, I really don’t know what you want me to say. I’m an idiot vampire, love. Just want to make you happy.”

“What were you doing with Tara before Willow showed up?”

“Tara?”

She was shaking him now, no restraint on her strength. “I saw you in the window!”

“Comforting. Love, I was c-comforting her.” He stuttered helplessly against the impact of his head on the wall.

She let go again and he sagged in relief. “You don’t comfort anyone but me.”

He licked blood from his lip where he must have bitten it. “Case you haven’t noticed, I’m a pair of tits shy of Glinda’s type. No need to get…” The punch cut him off, right on the diaphram, leaving a vacuum in his gut he couldn’t talk against.

“Don’t talk like that,” she said.

She hopped back, onto her feet, and the tiny cot shuddered in reaction. After so much violence, she was still. Her eyelashes lowered. “I thought I could trust you,” she said.

His eyes got wide. He leaned forward. “You can. I’m sorry. Buffy, love, I’m sorry!” He found himself on his knees, facing her. “Please. Won’t happen again. Just don’t… just don’t look like that, love, I can’t bear it.”

She reached forward, and to his own shock he flinched a little as she set her hand on his cheek. Her thumb brushed a little moisture from the corner of his eye. “You’re really sorry?” It almost didn’t sound like a question.

“I’m all for you, petal. Told you so. Gimmie another chance.”

She reached for him with her other hand, again he winced. She paused, hand curling, almost forming a fist and then flattening against his face.

She felt forgiving. “You’re just going to have to show me I can trust you again,” she whispered. “I can’t… I don’t have energy to worry about you, too.”

“Won’t have to, love,” he barely breathed. Her lips ghosted over his. He dared put his hands on her hips, though only lightly. He felt precariously balanced.

She pushed him over.

***

Anya hummed to herself as she cracked open a new roll of nickels to feed the register. This was her favorite time of the morning, when she was alone in the store, before opening, just minutes before opening, and she could put the last few things into order and relish a perfectly orderly shop before the first merchandise-handling non-buyer could come in and crush her optimism.

She could almost feel the orderliness – every object around her in its place, neat, clean. The plastic wrapper for the nickels went neatly into the wastebasket under the register, the fat little coins shining happily up from their little bin. Anya closed her eyes a moment and tried to breathe the feeling in. If only she could bottle this.

The shop bell rang, startling her out of her reverie most especially because she hadn’t unlocked the front door yet. But of course it was Giles, keys in hand, waving to her with a tight smile as he held the door open for Dawn, who walked in with her arms wrapped tight around herself.

“About that time, yes?” Giles lifted the ‘Open’ sign with one hand.

Anya nodded. “Sure. My meditative moment is ruined. May as well let the customers in.”

Dawn set her elbows on the counter, no doubt getting oily girl elbow prints on the glass. “I thought you LIKED customers.”

“Paying customers. Yes. I love them and their economy-supporting expenditures. But I’m not very happy right now and morning register balancing is my time for me.” She closed the drawer beligerantly and fell back against the stock shelves behind her, rubbing moisture from under her eyes with the heel of one hand.

“Oh my god,” Dawn said, leaning even further forward. Somehow she managed to whisper without lowering her volume one bit. “You’ve seen it too, haven’t you? Something is wrong with Xander and Buffy!”

Still holding it in his hand, Giles reluctantly turned the sign back around to “Closed” and shut the door.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not much to say about this one - Buffy is deranged while Xander goes slowly mad and Anya, Giles, and Dawn make plans of their own.

Xander had a creased frown of concentration as he ate his salami sandwich. She’d put the mustard on the bread again. You had to put the mustard between the meat and cheese, everyone knew that. It soaked into the bread and got all mushy by lunchtime otherwise.

It wasn’t the biggest of his annoyances lately, but Xander was finding his fuse shorter than usual lately. So short it worried him. He hadn’t started drinking like his dad – well unless you counted a beer or two after work every day, but what red-blooded American didn’t do that? Besides, Spike assured Xander that Xander’s beer selections hardly counted as more than water.

Xander swished the iced tea in his thermos-cup and wished it was beer. Maybe beer wasn’t the cause but a possible solution. He was so wound up worried about how wound up he was getting there wasn’t any time to worry about ways to not worry. Or something.

He slammed the cup down, tepid tea sloshing onto his hand. Damn it, if she’d just listen to him when he explained how to make a sandwich!

“Xan!”

He looked up, scowl relaxing a little for the first time in days. “Buff!”

She sashayed easily around the temporary construction fence.

He stood and wiped crumbs on his shirt. “Not supposed to be behind the fence, civilian! Or are you going to try and convince Tony to give you another chance?”

Buffy smiled, an honest-to-goodness sunshine and light smile and Xander felt himself reflect it. “No,” she said, “I think that bridge is seriously burnt. I just wanted to ask you to come by tonight.”

“There’s this amazing new invention, Buff, called a phone.”

“But I’m out and about on the interview trail and I saw your big, ugly fence!”

“And?”

“AAAND I need you to do some work for me, at the house.”

Xander threw down his mustard-soaked sandwich. “Unauthorized person on the worksite without a bump cap asking me to do a side-job? Buff, are you TRYING to get me fired?”

She bit her lower lip and squinted apologetically. “Sorry. Bad time… I…” She backed up a step. “I’ll go. But come by tonight? It’s just shackles. You remember what Angel had at the mansion? Something that’ll hold a vampire.”

He glowered as she waved and skipped back to the break in the fence. He hoped he was giving her the face of a man who absolutely WASN’T coming over to spend his free time dong unpaid construction.

Xander smashed his fist into the remains of his sandwich, knowing he was going to do as Buffy asked.

***

“I don’t drink tea,” Anya said. “If you’re going to fix refreshments I’ll take a cappuccino.”

Giles put the cup between Anya’s hands. “We have no cappuccino.”

“Don’t I get some?” Dawn stopped in her pacing.

“It will stunt your growth,” Giles said, picking up his own mug.

Dawn raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I’m already taller than Buffy. You’re just trying to make tea sound cool.”

“He was always easily irritated,” Anya said.

Dawn and Giles both turned to her. She looked small, curling both her hands around the hot tea-cup but making no move toward drinking it. “’Anya, don’t talk about sex in public’, or ‘Anya, don’t tell people they’re ugly’. I understand the concept of tact, it’s just that I don’t understand what the point is of speaking if you don’t say precisely what you think. But Xander, even when he was irritated with me, there was always something soft in his eyes when he looked at me, a promise that he’d never…” She sniffled. “Never hurt me.”

Giles sat down beside Anya. “Has Xander… has he not been himself?”

She raised red-rimmed eyes. “He hates me. I mean… he must! I can’t make him happy any more. He won’t BE happy. I find myself not wanting him around at all. Not even for sex. Though if I could cast a spell on him…”

“Yes, well!” Giles interrupted, turning to Dawn with a clear plea for help in his eyes. “That’s… Dawn?”

“Buffy’s been really mean,” Dawn said, and grimaced at how that sounded. She plunked down on Anya’s other side. “She isn’t the sister I knew, and I noticed something with Xander too… they both are kind of on-edge, but you can’t talk to them about it.” She glanced up at Giles, who nodded encouragingly. “I came here with Giles to find out if there was anything we can do.”

“If a man scorned me, I used to be able to turn him into something gross, or make his penis fall off,” Anya gestured weakly. “Now all I can manage is malignant use of condiments.”

“Perhaps,” Giles grimace into his teacup as though attempting augury and not pleased with the results. “Perhaps the first step is simply to talk to them.”

“You do that,” Anya patted the watcher’s hand. “I’m not going anywhere near either of them until I have ultimate arcane power again.”

Giles’ head snapped up with steel-grey eyes narrowed to needles.

“Or if,” Anya retracted her hand. “IF I… ultimate power had. Not that I’m going to. I just mean there might be the filing of police orders and the acquiring of self-defense classes in my future.” She laughed hollowly. “It’s not like I’d call up Dehoffryn…”

“Right,” Dawn said a little too brightly. “We talk. Group attack.”

***

Buffy felt almost normal, out in the sunshine, completing her errands. Normal-person errands: dropping off loan applications, aid applications, social services paperwork, buying stamps, and getting Xander to stop by and add vampire restraints to the basement.

Okay, maybe that last one wasn’t normal, but it needed to be done. Something made Buffy’s stomach hurt about the way Spike stayed where she put him. She didn’t want that. She didn’t know what she wanted, but not… not THAT whatever-it-was that made hot acid inside her. He was supposed to be evil, damn it, bad and dangerous and involving – not rolling over like a well-trained cocker spaniel.

She walked up the steps to the house with a sense of dread. He’d be in the basement, where she’d left him, where she’d told him he had better not move. She knew this like she knew the straps of her purse were beginning to get uncomfortable where they cut in to her shoulder, but she hoped it wasn’t true.

Her purse fell onto the sofa. “Spike?” She set her keys on the dish on the credenza, walking toward the kitchen. “Spike?”

Hope and excitement welled in her heart. Let him be gone. Let him have escaped. Give her something to be angry about, something to FEEL. There was something just behind her, just fear, maybe, but it always felt like it was just behind her and every minute that she didn’t look back and confront it was a minute she cold stay sane and normal and every minute she was alone, not busy, not doing, it was creeping up on her.

The kitchen was empty. “Spike!”

Footsteps pounded up steps. The basement door swung open to reveal an anxious Spike. “Yes, kitten?”

Yes. Thank god, Buffy thought, and the fear melted away. “Did I say you could leave the cot?”

Dumbfounded, he glanced behind him as though hoping to find an answer written there. “But you called and… uh…”

He looked downright cute as he flailed in the air, sailing down the steps, eyes wide and arms windmilling. He caught a bit of banister on his way down and it snapped in his fist.

Buffy smiled and took her time following him down.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still busy watching Capn's John and Jack snog, friends?
> 
> Well, if you can tear yourselves away, here's more "Falling". :)

Dawn threw a much-suffering look over her shoulder as she and Giles entered the living room. Buffy’s purse was prominently displayed on the sofa, fallen onto its side. “Buffy!” she called, dropping her keys next to her sister’s. “Stop boinking the vampire and get up here!”

Giles winced, one hand reaching for his glasses, but somehow, he steadied himself. “Really, Dawn…”

The younger Miss Summers held up a hand to stop him. “OH, they are boinking, believe me. BUFFY!”

Giles wondered if super lung-power was some sort of side-affect of Dawn’s origins as the key.

Buffy burst out of the basement door, red-cheeked and breathless. “What? Problem?”

Giles tactfully avoided Dawn’s “I told you so” eye roll, hurrying forward to meet Buffy half-way. “If you’re not busy, Buffy, I feel we must talk.”

Buffy pushed a sweat-dampened lock of hair back from her forehead. “Kind of in the middle of a thing.”

“By ‘talk’ he means ‘intervention’,” Dawn propped herself across the hallway, blocking Giles’ escape route. “You burned his hands, Buffy. I mean, what the heck?”

Buffy frowned at Dawn. “What? Who? Giles, what’s going on?”

“Dawn is very concerned about your behavior lately.” Giles frowned down at her. “And frankly so am I.”

Buffy furrowed her brow. “Well, aside from coming back from the dead and taking on a whole world of adult responsibility, I’ve been fine, Giles, thanks for asking.” She rolled her eyes and went to the refrigerator.

“I realize what you’ve been through… well, none of us could ever hope to understand the trauma. But we can help, as much as you’ll let us. If there’s anything you need…”

“Hey! Less coddling more finding out how wacked she is,” Dawn said.

Giles made shooing motions at Dawn.

Buffy straightened up from the refrigerator, a yogurt cup in hand. “I need money,” she said. “I need to know Dawn isn’t going to get herself killed, or worse - shipped off to Dad. I need time and space every once in a while to just do what I want.” She ripped the top off the yogurt and flung it expertly into the trash. “Can you give me that? Any of it?”

“Perhaps,” Giles said quietly. “Buffy, where is Spike?”

“Ha!” Dawn said from not quite as far away as Giles would have liked.

Buffy shrugged. “The basement,” she said.

“You see, that is part of what is concerning all of us. Why is Spike in your basement? Why is he here at all?”

“Got me,” Buffy said, stirring her yogurt. “He’s a big old ball of annoying and a poster child for vigilant slaying.”

“Dawn tells me that Spike has not left this house in two weeks – that, in fact, you have prevented him from doing so.”

She licked her spoon. “It’s been two weeks?”

Giles squinted at her. “You… you can start denying all of this any time now.”

“Giles, it’s just Spike.” She twirled her spoon in the air. “He’s an evil, soulless thing, isn’t he? It’s not like I’d treat a real person like this. And really? It’s way better than when you had him chained in the bathtub. He gets to leave his cot when I have something useful for him to do. Oh so NOT making the mistake of having him cook again, though. He’s worse than Dawnie.”

The watcher blinked rapidly. “Did I teach you this? This… conditional morality?”

“You remember when he messed with us against Adam. I’m keeping him out of trouble, putting him to use.” She dabbed thoughtfully at her yogurt. “And it’s not like he minds. Between you and me, I think vampires like getting hit.”

Behind the wall, Dawn was making all kinds of noises indicative of “I told you so.”

Giles set his hands on the counter and lowered his gaze, studying Buffy like he’d never seen her before. “The question isn’t whether Spike wants or deserves all manner of abuse. The question is why you would ever think to dole it out. Buffy – whatever you are getting from this, there are better ways to… to feel good about oneself or…”

“Hold that thought,” Buffy said, dropping her yogurt and running to answer the front door, where someone was knocking.

Dawn was suddenly in Giles’ face. “You didn’t ask her about the boinking.”

Giles grimaced. “I think we can leave that implied for now.”

“But it’s the boinking that makes it creepy!”

From the livingroom they heard Xander loudly proclaim his arrival. “Point me to the construction project and compensatory beer,” he raised his toolbox in one hand.

“Just down here,” Buffy said. “I have the parts scavenged from the old mansion, but couldn’t figure out how to get metal into stone.”

“For that takes ancient magic known as the stone-bit on my electric drill. Hey, G-man.” Xander nodded as Buffy led him into the kitchen and to the door to the basement.

Giles’ brow furrowed. “What in blazes are you doing?”

Xander shrugged, lifting his tool box again as though it answered everything, and followed Buffy down the basement steps.

Giles looked at Dawn. “What are they doing?”

The girl answered with a raise of her eyebrows. “What part of ‘Buffy’s gone coo-coo’ did you have trouble understanding?”

Giles shook his head and started after Xander.

“Woah! Wait!” Dawn grabbed his arm. “You can’t go down there!”

Through clenched teeth he ground out, “I assure you I won’t see anything I haven’t before.”

Dawn let go, needing both hands of a sudden to cover her mouth and hold in a keening wail.

Giles tried not to imagine what would be awaiting him at the base of the stairs. Much like trying not to picture a purple elephant, it didn’t work well. So he had a storehouse of vulgarity behind his eyeballs when confronted with the thankfully mundane tableaux of Xander and Buffy standing under the stairs, examining the wall. “Here, and here,” Xander was saying, marking the wall with a pencil. “It’s good it’s an interior wall. Once the holes are drilled…”

A small army cot had been pulled away from the wall and lay at an odd angle in front of them. Giles scanned the room, almost hearing that insidious music the horror movies play as the camera pans over ordinary, mundane things before turning full to the gore.

Spike was sitting on the dryer, hands clasped between his knees, wearing nothing but his black jeans. His wrists looked raw and he had some bruises and cuts, but nothing serious, nothing more than he’d looked after a hundred patrols in the past. Giles felt blood rush to his cheeks as he felt like a foolish old man who’d over-reacted to some hip new slang term.

Still, he stepped toward the vampire. “Spike,” he said, carefully. “Are you well?”

The vampire raised his head with a little quirk of surprise as if this was the most normal of situations. “I look unwell to you, watcher?”

Giles wondered briefly if the universe itself was conspiring to exasperate him, or just the population of Sunnydale. “Dawn said you had been injured… burned.”

“Oh.” Spike raised a hand and wriggled it at him. The palm was mottled with darker pinks. “Got better. Still a vampire, Rupes.”

Spike chewed a bit on the side of one finger then balled his fists up between his knees again and pretended to be interested in something on the south wall of the basement.

Well, this was the mother of all awkward moments. Giles watched Xander and Buffy discussing ‘load bearing members’ for a while and gave up. “I’ll be upstairs when you’re finished, Buffy,” he said, tiredly, his feet sluggish as he made his way back up to face the Wrath of Dawn.

Fortunately, he found that Tara and Willow were with the teen. The witches were cheerfully gathering supplies for the evening’s dinner. Giles smiled in relief.

Until he saw the tense, frightened look in Dawn’s eyes, and how she was standing back, her arms curled against her chest, and turned to him with a panic as though he’d left her alone with a mountain lion.

“Let’s… wait in the front room,” Giles said, resting his arm across Dawn’s shoulders. “We’re under foot here.”

She nodded very rapidly and leaned into him as they walked.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a little embarrassed about this one. It's... yeah... you'll read. Remember: this was requested to be daaaaaark fic. Buffy, Willow, and Xander are not themselves.

Anya was not a victim. She wasn’t. She was a modern, empowered woman with purchasing power and high self-esteem. She was everything her magazines said she should be.

Which was why she had refused to go to Buffy’s house, and refused to go home, because either of those places might have Xander in them. No, she said, the shop must stay open!

She wondered if anyone would question the timing of The Magic Box first ever twenty-four hour sale.

There hadn’t been a customer since sunset. Stores in Sunnydale didn’t tend to stay open past dark. Not the cute downtown shops, anyway. She flipped helplessly through Vogue.

“No,” she said, “I’m not doing this. I’ve eviscerated men for less!” She slammed the magazine flat against the counter and started closing down the register.

She would go to Buffy’s. Giles and Dawn were there, that made it safe. She should have gone from the start.

***

Spike watched the slayer and Xander attach manacles to the basement wall. Xander was sinking bolts through to the other side of the stonework, just in case Spike developed extraordinary abilities beyond any vampire ever born.

Spike was trying to be casual about the whole thing. If there was one thing he wasn’t, it was afraid. He trusted the slayer. She might be going through a rough patch, but she wasn’t the kind to dust a bloke, or leave him to starve, or do any of the other things that would make a man anxious about giving up his freedom of mobility.

Was she?

Xander came around from the other side of the wall, twirling a box wrench in one hand. “That’s it,” he said.

Buffy picked up one of the iron manacles and tugged on it. The chain groaned and a small amount of stone dust skated down from the freshly drilled holes.

“Spike, get over here.”

Spike slipped off the dryer, his bare feet slapping the floor. He ran a hand through his hair and tried to come up with a reason to take longer crossing the room.

“Now,” Buffy added, her voice taking on that toneless quality it had acquired lately.

Spike put some swagger into his steps. “Good job, Harris. I’ll take it from here.” He hooked a thumb in his waistband and very purposefully licked his lips.

The leer was almost ruined by the merry triumph in his eyes as Harris gripped his wrench harder and glared.

“Strip,” Buffy said.

Undead and alive, both men turned confused faces to her.

“Take off your jeans.” Buffy rolled her eyes. “It’s easier to do it now than when you’re chained up.”

Spike looked at Xander and shrugged. “All right. Try not to feel too inadequate, carpenter.” He jerked the fly open – Buffy’d only left three intact buttons so it wasn’t all that hard to undo – and stepped out of his jeans, watching smugly for the other man’s reaction.

Xander, for his part, kept his eyes on Spike’s face, his expression unreadable.

Buffy pushed the cot back into place, little metal legs screeching on concrete. “Sit down and we’ll get to the chaining.”

He was not anxious. Not worried. Not… “Bugger it. Buffy, I love you, and I want to be whatever you need, but I’m not comfortable with this chain idea, all right?” He took a slow step, hip forward, and reached for her. “We don’t need those, do we?”

Xander snorted.

Buffy grabbed Spike’s forearm and twisted, stepping back and pushing him onto the bed. He sprawled on it, the venerable springs groaning. Xander’s snort became a full-out laugh.

“Hold him,” Buffy said, putting her knee on Spike’s chest and reaching for the first of the cuffs.

Spike felt the fight go out of him. He laid back limp while Xander put a knee on his wrist and the slayer attached the cuffs. She looked cold, hard. “Do you even like me?” he asked. “A little?”

The metal was cold and she jerked hard on the chains to test the fastness of the cuffs.

“Say ‘no’, Buff,” Xander said, watching his friend as he stepped back, no longer needed to restrain the vampire. “Tell him how you feel.”

“How I feel,” Buffy shook her head. “Xan, I haven’t been feeling a lot lately. Well,” she ran her hand down Spike’s chest. “Unless you count this.”

“This is as far as I go helping you with this,” Xander said. “I thought you wanted to imprison him, Buff, not get your kink on.”

Spike shrugged away from Buffy’s disinterested petting and scooted back to the wall, sitting up and testing the length of the chains. “Bugger off, Harris, this has nothing to do with you.”

Buffy backhanded him. “Don’t talk to my friends like that.”

Spike heaved a sigh and jerked his hands upward.

“I feel… better when I can touch him,” Buffy said, sliding her fingers along Spike’s scalp and gripping his hair. “The sex is good. More than good. His tongue is, like, freaky. Magic.”

“Must be from those diligent work-outs he gives it wise-cracking all the time.”

“Right. This is diabolical, slayer. You’ve found the worst torture imaginable – discussing my prowess with the whelp.” He hooked an arm behind his head and affected a disinterested expression.

“Leave me alone with him,” Xander said. “Buffy? Leave me with him for a bit.”

Spike straightened. “What?”

“Okay,” Buffy said. She trailed her fingers along Spike’s thigh briefly before stepping off the cot. “I have to go placate Giles, anyway. He’s major with the disturbed for some reason.”

“Buffy? Luv… what the hell?”

But she was already trotting up the stairs without a backward glance. Spike instinctively jumped to his feet, only to be jerked back by the chains – they weren’t quite long enough to allow him to step off the bed. He tugged ruefully on them.

“I do good work,” Xander said. He paced the length of the cot, jangling that same box wrench in a loose fist.

“What could you possibly want with me, Harris? I’m not a stand-in for your lout of a father or…”

Spike’s eyesight swam with black spots. The wrench hit him with more force than he would have credited the boy with, cracking against his temple.

Xander crawled onto the cot. He fisted Spike’s hair, the wrench still in one hand, pressing hard against his scalp. “Come on, fangless. Fight back.” The boy’s voice was breathy, barely escaping tight lips. “I want you to.”

“Well, aren’t you a big man, Harris.” Spike wrapped his fists around the chains and pulled them taut. “Want to set off the chip? That get you your jollies? Unhindered, I could snap you like a twig. Wouldn’t even make a dent in my day-planner, besting you.”

The boy’s breath was hot, coming faster than it ought. “Keep talking, corpse-guy. Let’s see how ‘magical’ that tongue is.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The scoobs have been going nuts since Buffy came back. Only Giles, Dawn, and Anya seem unaffected.
> 
> Now, without further ado! Falling! Unlucky 13!

Dawn watched Willow and Tara like a gazelle watching lions playing in the watering hole, and Giles was feeling skittish himself.

Buffy came up from the basement looking – well, just this side of blank and unreadable. She put on a smile and waved and said something cheery about needing to wash up, and then disappeared up the stairs.

Willow and Tara set out supper with calm smiles and playful chatter. It was a compelling lie, a pleasant façade that made it hard for Giles to overcome his inherent desire to be polite. One wouldn’t think there was anything wrong, except that Tara had been so insistent about breaking things off just days before, and there was something empty in her eyes, now, a drugged happiness, and the way she kept casually brushing against Willow like she needed to reassure herself Willow was near.

“Dear lord, Willow, what have you done?”

She frowned at him in honest confusion and looked down at the casserole in her hands. “It’s just green beans. No fruit and meat living in sin. I know how you hate that.”

Giles felt Dawn’s hand constrict painfully on his forearm under the table. He turned to find her staring at him with wide eyes, almost vibrating with purpose. Hoping, no doubt, that she could somehow communicate telepathically if she just THOUGHT hard enough. He knew the feeling. He cleared his throat. Willow was watching him, still standing with casserole in hand, caught in the act of setting the table. “N-nothing,” Giles said, and Dawn’s talon-like grip receded. “I’d like to talk to you, Willow, some time, soon, in private. About the spells you’ve been casting.”

She set the casserole down. “You don’t trust me.”

Not in the least. “Well, I’m concerned. Raising the dead is not a parlor trick. Even with my years of experience I would NEVER attempt…”

“No, you never would,” Willow said, sounding half-smug and half-accusing. She sat down and raised her eyebrows at Giles, a clear challenge.

Good lord! Did the girl think she was so far beyond him? Giles winced inwardly, realizing that her arrogance was not unfounded. “Nevertheless, I have experience and knowledge that you shouldn’t discount. These forces you are dealing with…”

There was a sound, from the basement – a clunk of wood against metal. Giles was momentarily distracted. What was Xander doing? And was Spike just, what? Directing?

“We were lucky, don’t you understand, that Buffy’s resurrection worked.” Giles realized he was whispering and forced himself to talk more normally. “You could have brought back a monstrosity, a broken shell of a thing. Or we could have triggered unimaginable consequences, primal forces, ghosts of retrib...”

“Geez, I get it!” Willow threw up her hands. “You don’t trust me. Don’t let Willow cast a spell! We’ll all end up blind! Like I hadn’t heard this before.”

Giles felt his shoulders sink. He’d forgotten how very YOUNG Willow still was.

“Hello?” The front door opened and Anya called across the living room to them. “Am I not knocking loud enough?”

Dawn leapt up. “Anya!” she cried, like she was greeting a long-lost and much beloved relative. “I’m sorry we were… there was… dinner.” She bounced a little on her toes and grabbed Anya’s hand. “Come in. Come sit and eat.”

Anya refused to budge. “I saw Xander’s car out front. Is he here? I almost didn’t come in because I don’t want to be at the same place as him right now, but then I thought, hey! Who does he think he is? A walking restraining order? I should be keeping him from places!”

“Anya,” Giles touched the lintel-post between living and dinning rooms as though he needed the support. “You decided to come after all?”

Anya frowned. “You’re relieved to see me. You’re never relieved to see me. Where’s Xander?”

Giles glanced at the floor. When he raised his head, his jaw was clenched. “The basement, I believe.”

“If he comes up here will you hold him with your deceptively strong hands while I give him a piece of my mind?”

“I… well, that is…”

Something fell in the kitchen. Giles touched the lintel again.

Tara walked out of the kitchen, touching her blouse like she was surprised to find it on her. “What… what am I doing here?”

Willow ran after her, “Baby… sweetie, come to the kitchen, we’ll fix it. Just come back with me.”

Tara twisted out of Willow’s grasp, staring at her with dawning recognition. “No. N..no you wouldn’t. You COULDN”T.”

“Sweetie,” Willow grabbed again for her lover’s arm, desperately like she was drowning. “Please. It will only take a minute.”

“Oh my god!” Anya stomped forward. “No means no! Let go of her!”

“Thank god,” Giles muttered, and took up a stance next to Anya, who had her arms crossed and was quivering like a small dog ready to attack. “Willow, listen to Anya. Your behavior toward Tara has been, well it’s concerning.”

Willow wrapped her arms around Tara’s, despite the other woman struggling to get away. Her eyes darkened. “Get out of my house. All of you.”

“It isn’t YOUR house!” Dawn slammed her fist on the dining table.

Anya just took three steps and wrenched Tara’s arm out of Willow’s grasp. Willow and Anya’s eyes locked, and there was a strange crackling sound in the air. “Just try it,” Anya said. “Go right ahead and try it, witch. See how you like it when Hallie hears Tara’s wish.”

Willow took a step back, shoulders squared. “Tara wouldn’t do that.”

“Right. And you wouldn’t use magic to keep her. And Xander wouldn’t… hurt me.” Anya twisted, taking Tara’s arm tight against her body like a runningback protecting a football, and just like that she plowed past any interference, practically dragging Tara out the front door.

Giles didn’t even notice his arm moving before he had his hand splayed on Willow’s sternum, stopping her. “Let them go.”

The little witch hit him, in the side, her small fist hard enough to cause a deep intake of breath. “You! You never liked me with Tara. You all hated it. You think… you think ‘oh if only she was still with Oz.’”

“No, we really don’t,” Dawn said. “I liked Oz.”

Down the front walk, Anya fumbled to get the keys to her car out of her purse without letting go of Tara. “I have no idea why I did that. This is not what I was planning on doing. But it could be good… it could be… we’ll get you some coffee. That helps with drunkenness so it should help with hexedness. And then… well, I’ll have a witch! I mean, not have-have, but you’re a witch and I’m… well I’m a pathetic, vulnerable nobody but between the two of us…”

Tara slowly pulled her hand out of Anya’s too-tight grasp. “It’s okay,” she said. “Anya. Let’s just go. I can… I can go myself.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Warnings*** This part contains Spander naughtiness. (Okay, not so much a warning as a promise.)

Xander didn’t know what he had intended to do, but it wasn’t this.

He knew Spike would fight back. Chip or no chip, the vamp was predictable. Three blows to the head, the last an open-handed slap just for insult’s sake, and the vampire had launched forward, throwing Xander onto the hard floor. His box-wrench skittered into the dryer.

But Xander had gotten up far quicker from that little painful trip than Spike, who hung from his chains, half off the edge of the bed, cradling his head.

Xander kicked Spike in the ribs. He moved very little in response, only curling away – testimony to the pain of the chip.

“Come on, fangless. That the best you got? My dad hits me harder than that to get the remote.” Xander hauled the strangely pliant vampire fully on the mattress.

“Fuck off, Harris. Fuckin’ not worth my time.” Spike’s eyelids were fluttering, his jaw clenched, the words barely making it out.

Xander’s hands wandered of their own accord, over exposed flesh, vulnerable, soft skin. Spike twisted and jerked away, chains straining. Xander just shifted to the left, grabbed a wrist, and pressed it down into the mattress.

No longer convulsing from the after-affects of the chip firing, Spike stared up at him. “What the hell…?”

Xander shifted again, placing his knees on Spike’s thighs, his hands on Spike’s wrists. “We used to have this game, in school. Well, it wasn’t a ‘game’ so much as a sadistic ritual. Some bigger, meaner kid would hold down a smaller, wussier kid until he said ‘uncle’.”

“Glad to see public schools have evolved so much since I was a lad.”

Xander studied the vampire under him, the look of more confusion than fear in his eyes, and felt his blood beating at his skin. “See, I never understood why it was ‘uncle’. Always makes me think of my Uncle Rory, and if you knew Rory, you’d understand why this was a painful childhood memory.”

“Going to make a point, Harris, or just disturb me to death?”

Xander let his lips skim over the vampire’s cheek. It felt – well, like skin, tiny hairs tickling, but no heat under, so very dead. He licked his lips. “Say ‘uncle’.”

Spike jerked his head away. “Uncle.”

“No, see, that doesn’t work. You have to say it like you mean it.”

“Sod off, Harris. I did go to school. You want me to say I’m at your mercy? Be stating the obvious.”

Xander remembered Larry once pinning him down in third grade and letting a long trail of drool come off his lip, threatening to drip onto him, then slurping it up again – disgusting, thy name is third grade. But the memory was stirring in him now, making his mouth water.

He licked the vampire’s neck. Spike jerked and bucked in response, hissing curses. So he did it again, lower, into the hollow of his shoulder. The skin was pleasant, clean, and there was something thrilling about leaving his saliva all over it.

“Harris! FUH! Uncle, already!”

No, whatever it was Xander had planned on doing, this wasn’t it. But he wasn’t about to stop, either.

***

Buffy came down the stairs, fresh from her shower, feeling calm again, normal again. The frightening thing, the angry, shapeless thing was farther away, almost forgettable.

So she was more than a little ticked to see a major confrontation unfolding in her living room. “Guys? What’s the damage?”

Willow’s eyes were black, and Giles was holding both her wrists, glaring back at her with a visage no less grim for the lack of special affects.

Dawn ran to her. “Buffy, tell Willow to calm down. Please! She’s going to… I don’t know what she’s going to do but this is GILES. He’s here to help!”

“Bring her back!” Willow said. Her hair lifted, as though from static.

Buffy looked from her best friend to her watcher to her sister and made a simple decision. She walked up to Willow and punched her in the jaw.

Willow flew into the dinning room table, scattering plates and silverware. Buffy examined her fist. “Weird. That kinda tingled.”

Giles stared for a moment at his empty hands, then dove after Willow, cradling her head and checking for damage. The witch rolled in his grasp like a doll.

Dawn gaped. “Um… thanks?”

“Buffy, you can’t solve all your problems with violence.” Giles gathered Willow up into his arms. “What are we to do when she wakes up? Have you any idea how much worse this situation is?”

“Oh, like you were so close to talking her down.”

“I’ll get… aspirin, or something,” Dawn said, running up the stairs.

Giles settled Willow on the couch. “What have you done?” he asked the sleeping witch. He brushed a lock of hair back from her face. Asleep, she seemed so very young, so innocent.

Giles found Buffy righting the plates on the dining table. “This looks good. I mean, I suppose we can still eat, right? Should we wait for Willow to wake up?”

Giles reached for his glasses. “Buffy… something is not right. Do you see that something dark is affecting Willow? I’m concerned that the spell she performed to… to bring you back… I’m concerned.”

Buffy shrugged. “I haven’t noticed. But you do the research thing and I’ll keep an eye on possibly-evil Willow.”

With this, Buffy sat down and spooned casserole onto a plate.

Giles’ stomach felt like a ball of hot acid and he doubted he would ever eat again. “Perhaps… perhaps Dawn and I should go straight to the Magic shop, then, and start… researching.”

Buffy looked up, petite eyebrows canted with concern. “You’re not going to stay and eat? This is, like, the first time we’ve had real food in weeks.”

“No,” Giles said, “this is too important.” He set his hand on the newel post and watched up the stairs for Dawn to return. She did, carrying a blue plastic box marked with a red cross.

“I have stuff,” she said, gesturing with the box. “I don’t know what will help Willow. Usually it’s the bad guys getting knocked out.”

“Give it to Buffy,” Giles said, “We’re leaving.”


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS!! Danger Will Robinson! Danger!
> 
> Spike so not having a good day and Evil!Xander slash. Blame **tamakin**! She demanded I write more 'falling'. And **ash_carpenter** totally demanded more slash. I can't help it if all that falls out of my brain is non-con nastiness! Really!
> 
> Um... yeah, this and the next chapter are pretty much the low point of the fic, Spike-wise. Just so you know. Oh, and I now officially hate this title, having found not one, not two, but THREE other fics online with this title. *cries*

Spike’s head rolled from side to side. He’d given up, leaving his limbs loose and pliant. “What do you want me to say? Harris? I’ll say it, okay?”

Xander smiled a quiet little smile at him and went back to his slow exploration of Spike’s torso. It wasn’t that he was all that interested – okay, maybe a little, because this body was so flawlessly formed even a straight guy had to admit a little interest. But Xander wasn’t thinking about Spike’s beauty – he was loving his discomfort – how he was trembling a little all over now, like a leaf in the wind. It had him hard – just the violation of it. If Spike’s expressive face weren’t pleading so prettily for him to stop, Xander wasn’t sure he would be intent on going on.

Now he knew why the attacker in those freaky movies always said, “Oh you love this,” because those words just slipped out of Xander’s mouth and he was salivating more, like he had the yummiest ice-cream sundae on earth in front of him. He bit into the slight curve above Spike’s left hip and felt the vampire twist and shake in reaction.

“You don’t want to do this. Harris, whatever’s got control of you, when it wears off, you’re gonna want to wash your mouth in lye, mate. You’re lickin’ a corpse!”

Yeah, and that was two thirds of the thrill. Something had short-circuited in Xander’s brain, linking disgust and thrill. He licked the ridge of pelvic bone and Spike really bucked this time, trying to dislodge him. His stomach was trembling so much. Xander relented on his downward attack to nip at the sensitive flesh just below the navel. “You going to fight me, wanna-bite? Come on, tell me.”

“You’re gonna wish you’d stopped three exits back.”

“Why?” Xander crawled forward a little, pressing his knee between Spike’s legs, feeling the soft skin there shift. “You gonna re-grow some balls?”

Spike’s head was thrown back, eyes squeezed shut, he panted. “No. Git. I mean YOU are gonna HATE YOURSELF. Stupid fuckin’ git. Don’t do this. Do you even see what you’re doing?”

“I do.” Xander licked his lips. “So should you. Open your eyes.”

He didn’t wait too long for the vampire to comply before punching him. If anything, Spike squeezed his eyelids tighter, little white wrinkles forming around them.

“Look at me, you little punk,” Xander hissed, just the way his father would. “You rotten little shit, LOOK.” He lifted Spike’s shoulders off the bed and shook him.

Spike’s head flopped like a rag-doll’s and still he wouldn’t open his eyes. “Fuckoff” he ground through gritted teeth.

“Fine. Don’t want to look at me?” Xander flipped the vampire onto his stomach, the chains wrapping around him and pulling taut with a groan.

Spike’s struggles awakened to new urgency and Xander actually laughed, feeling the slight body squirm between his legs. An elbow jab caught him in the ribs, but Xander was beyond feeling pain just at the moment as the chip-shock rocked Spike once more.

Xander pressed his body close to Spike’s. It felt powerful, naked flesh against his clothes. He pinned down the offending arm that had jabbed him. “Next time, you’re going to look at me when I talk to you. Aren’t you, Spikey? Or do you LIKE getting beat?”

With a shudder, Spike stopped struggling. He lay still.

“Oh no, you don’t get to give up,” Xander said. His dick was pressing painfully in the crease of his jeans so Xander shifted to adjust himself.

All that creamy smooth skin below him. He noticed little cresent-shaped marks here and there. He passed his hand over them, they weren’t raised or anything. Sets of… four… most common near the sides, reaching up along the back, curving down and in the delectable swell of his butt. Thin, delicate scratches of red or healed white.

Fingernail marks. Buffy.

Xander dug his nails in, deep as he could over the light marks, gouging them out. Spike cried out and fought against his chains like a fish on the line.

“Look what you’ve done to her, Spike. You made her your whore.” He twisted his fingernails into another patch of crescents. “Is that right?”

Spike laughed. “Jesus, Harris. You’re blind. I’m the one chained up.”

“That’s right. You’re the whore.” Xander relaxed. That made sense. He undid his belt.

At the soft sound of the metal tang hitting the buckle as Xander pulled it free, Spike was all motion again. The chains groaned but held. He did good work, indeed.

And it was good. Really good that he struggled.

***

Buffy ate cheeseburger noodle casserole by herself. It was good, actually, but only blandly good. Nothing really FELT good anymore – only sorta good. Still she diligently finished a small portion – Dawn had made some noises about her being too thin. Then she checked on Willow, still unconscious on the couch. She adjusted the aspirin and water glass on the coffee table to make sure they were in optimal Willow-viewing-on-waking position.

The itch was starting again, at the back of her brain. That feeling of… no.

Buffy forced herself to walk to the basement at a normal pace. There was no rush. IT wasn’t going to get her. Not before she got to him, to the calming sensation of him.

The old metal cot was squeaking, shaking, and hitting against the wall under the stairs. Buffy crouched to peer between the wooden slat-steps. Spike was in an awkward position, one arm pressed between his shoulder blades by Xander’s darker hands, the other twisted under him, and his lovely smooth back was rocking back and forth with the mattress so it was hard to tell if the cot was moving him or he was moving the cot.

Buffy slipped her legs out from under her and sat on the next step down. She was trapped between two contradictory feelings and couldn’t bring herself to decide which to go with – angrily running down and punching Xander or finding a better place to watch.

And she wasn’t sure what either impulse said about her.

So she just watched the rhomboid slice of the scene that showed between two steps. Spike really had a lovely nape. The little hairs that so neatly led down to his curving neck always tempted her. Always? She shook her head. Maybe.

She watched with detachment, like watching waves on the beach, forgetting a little even what she was looking at, while the rhythm picked up, broke, and shuddered to a halt. Spike didn’t move at all, but Xander’s hands were gripping, grabbing, moving about to keep hold, and then Xander’s head flopped into view, the back of it, sweaty, hair over his face.

Buffy got to her feet. “Xander?”

The little cot squeaked and there was the sound of hasty clothes-righting. Buffy took her time down the steps.

Xander was sweaty, hanging over Spike like he was surprised to find him there, one hand still on the waistline of his pants. He licked his lips, eyes darting from Buffy to the still vampire. “It’s… it’s not…”

Xander fell back, sitting on his heels, and ran his hands over his face. “I don’t know what came over me. I…”

“It’s okay,” Buffy said, and it sounded chipper, like she meant it.

She was getting pretty good at that voice.

Xander squinted at her. He scooted away from the seemingly dead body. Spike didn’t move at all.

“Did you knock him out?” Buffy frowned.

Spike flinched as Xander crawled hurriedly off the cot, and curled slightly, head tucking into his shoulder.

“I wasn’t sure,” Xander admitted.

There were smears of blood on Spike’s perfect backside. He curled tighter, spine bones protruding. In a harsh voice muffled by the mattress, he said, “Kick his teeth in, Slayer.”


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not very happy with how this section turned out. BLAH.
> 
> Warnings: blood, gore, craziness.

“Kick his teeth in, Slayer,” Spike hissed. He twisted, keeping his body close to the mattress he glared at her, face twisted in anger.

“You look ugly angry,” Buffy admonished, and reached for his face. He flinched from her touch then stared in disbelief as she smoothed his brow absently. “I think it’s better you didn’t knock him out,” she said to Xander.

“Buffy? You crazy bitch! Did you see what he did to me?” Spike jerked back, chains jangling as he crawled to the wall, one arm defensively in front of him. There was a distinct track of red oval impressions across his chest where the chain had been pressed.

Buffy crossed her arms. “I’m talking with Xander now.”

Xander laughed, a short, unbelieving laugh. He sat down on the bed. “That’s tellin’ him, Buff.”

Spike gaped. His voice barely a whisper. “You’ve gone completely barmy. All of you.”

Ignoring the vampire, Buffy took a seat next to Xander on the edge of the cot. Spike curled closer to the wall, staring at them in open disbelief.

“Are you okay?” Buffy asked her friend, putting an arm around Xander’s shoulders.

He sighed, relaxing into her touch. “Better. I… Buff… I don’t know what came over me. It’s…”

“Sh,” she brushed the hair back from his forehead. “It’s better, isn’t it?”

“I felt all… tight in my skin.”

“I know. You want to hurt someone, something, even yourself, a little. But it’s okay, because Spike’s here. Evil and safe.”

Xander squinted at Buffy. “You… you’re all right with this?”

“Can’t do it, Slayer. That was it. That was my limit.” Spike said. It was barely loud enough to be heard, and he had his wrist in front of his mouth, so Buffy decided he hadn’t intended to be heard and didn’t punish him.

There was a sudden, loud thump overhead, as though someone had overturned the coffee table. Followed by a strange crackling, an increase in static in the air.

Buffy’s eyes shot up to the ceiling. “Oh no,” she said.

“What?” Xander followed her gaze.

“I forgot about Willow.”

***

“Thank you both for coming,” Giles stepped aside to let Tara and Anya in. “Tea?”

“If you’re providing beverages…”

“Yes, yes, I know, cappuccino.” Giles closed the door. “I am, in fact, only providing tea.”

Tara ducked her head and mumbled a “Thank you,” that warmed his heart as much as it contrasted with Anya’s brittle glare at the tea-pot.

Dawn scooted back in her chair. “There’s cookies,” she offered, lifting the tin of biscuits.

“I have Willow’s notes, and everything I could find on the resurrection spell,” Tara held out a spiral binder and a slim leather-bound volume.

“Yes, well,” Giles took the proffered items, immediately flipping through pages. “Now comes the agonizingly tedious part. Let’s get started.”

***

Willow walked down the stairs to the basement. “Buffy? Buffy?” She stopped when she saw the three figures on the little cot. Two sitting companionably on the edge, one curled against the wall behind them, all three staring at her with a mixture of hope and fear.

“Buffy, when someone calls your name they usually expect a response of some kind.” Willow stomped down the steps. She crossed her arms and glared.

The silence lasted a beat longer than what felt polite. Buffy slowly stood, holding a hand out to her friend. “Are you feeling okay?” Buffy asked. “You were out cold.”

Willow took a step back. “You hit me!”

“You looked like you were going to do something… something magic to Giles.”

“Where’s Tara?”

Xander looked anxiously from one friend to another. “Did I miss something?”

“Tara’s allowed to leave, Willow, if she wants.”

Willow’s hair started to lift out from her head, the static electricity growing around her again.

Xander jumped up. “Woah. Woah, Wills! Whatever it is, we’re on your side.”

“You let her GO!”

“You can’t control Tara,” Buffy said. “It’s wrong.”

Willow tossed her head, eyes searching the ceiling. “’It’s wrong’?” she repeated. She thrust her hand out, suddenly.

Spike, who had been watching the proceedings cautiously from behind his crossed arms and folded legs, suddenly rose into the air. He swam against the invisible force, smacking the wall and the wooden stairs overhead until he was floating, a tethered balloon on his chains. “Buggerfuckingbuggeringhell!”

“Spike’s not human! He doesn’t count!”

Xander ducked under a kicking Spike-leg, hurrying away from the cot.

Willow’s voice was a mocking sing-song, “But Buffy ‘it’s wrong!’”

“I don’t want to have this conversation,” Xander said. He ran two hands hard through his hair. “With you… both of you… god. No.” He ran up the stairs.

Willow watched him go with a bored expression then turned her eyes back on Buffy, expectantly. “Where. Is. Tara?”

“Or, what, you’ll make Spike-kabobs?”

Willow’s hand twisted and Spike slammed into the wall. She didn’t even bother to look at her work.

Spike twisted, trying to get his wrists around the chains and shorten them. “Christ, witch! She doesn’t give a fuck what happens to me!”

“I don’t KNOW where Tara is. She left with Giles and Dawn.”

Willow seemed to consider this. She rotated her hand again. There was the sound of chains straining and falling loose as Spike tried to fight the invisible ropes that were tugging him out further into the room. “And will you stop me from going after them?”

“I don’t want you to hurt Giles,” Buffy said, slowly, as though convincing herself.

“You HIT me, Buffy!”

“You’re not acting yourself.”

“I’M not?” Willow tugged on invisible strings and Spike let out a strangled cry.

Buffy sighed. “Look… wait here, I’ll go get Tara for you, okay?”

“No you won’t. You said it was wrong and we all have to bow to Buffy’s decisions!”

“Will! I’m trying to see both sides here. You really think you scored big points with Tara by magicking up her mind?”

“It was temporary! She’d forget in time and it would all be okay.”

“Maybe you should just TALK to her. Did you think of that? You know, what all the rest of us who don’t have magic powers have to do when we screw up our relationships?”

“Or just chain our boyfriend up? Really healthy, Buffy.”

Buffy scowled. “Spike isn’t my boyfriend and we aren’t in a relationship.” Her hands clenched into fists and she took a menacing step toward the witch. “He’s… he’s therapy. God, Willow. You don’t even know what you DID to me.”

Buffy’s voice cracked and she shook her arms, as though to dispel her rage. “Just… arg!” She ran up the stairs.

The invisible strings holding Spike up snapped and he fell with very real gravity onto the little cot. Springs shrieked at the impact.

Willow let her hand slowly fall, stunned and confused.

A soft voice shook her from her reverie. “Red? Witch? Willow? Can you get me out of this? C’mon, help us out, love. Whatever you want in return. Just get these chains off.”

The vampire was on his stomach, holding himself up on his forearms to peer imploringly at her. His hair was disarrayed, lying partially in his eyes – it looked longer not gelled back.

Willow considered all of this from her moment of confused dispassion. Then she raised her hand again. The pleading expression widened into shock, then tightened with pain.

“What did you do to Buffy?” she demanded, approaching the couch.

“Uh… Buffy? Willow what the…?”

Willow felt muscle separate from sinew under her hands, and was glad she’d studied so hard in biology class.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The sun rises, snow falls, I post more Falling!
> 
> Warning: Gore! mmmm Gore.

Xander sat on the couch, running his fingers repeatedly through his hair, half nervous habit, half honest fear that his coiffure was badly disarranged.

Maybe if he could get his hair straightened out, he would be straightened out.

What had he done? What was he doing? Why was he feeling this way – angry and tense all the time? God he wanted a drink. But he wasn’t going to get one. He was avoiding alcohol at the present moment. He just had to get a grip.

Buffy bounded into the living room, in the process of shrugging a jacket over her shoulders. “Xan, keep Willow from killing Spike. I’ll be back in a jif.”

She flipped her ponytail out of the collar of the jacket, flashed him a tense, insincere smile, and was out the front door.

Xander looked at his hands, crooked fingers in front of his face, stilled in the act of once again trying to straighten his hair. When did it start? He pulled himself back, to look dispassionately at himself. When you found a crack in a wall, you didn’t just smooth it over with more plaster, you tried to find where it was coming from. Xander tested the joists in his soul.

Anya looking at him like he was a stranger. Her hands shaking as she made his sandwich. The peanut butter jar smashing against the wall, its contents following it to the floor with a slow sucking sound. Snapping at Harry over some stupid four by sixes being stacked wrong – like it mattered. Imagining the sound Harry’s skull would make when it hit wood. Knowing the sound Anya made when she hit the refrigerator door.

And Spike. How Xander had craved his submission, but it didn’t satisfy. Even now he felt this jittery need in his gut, something missing, something essential. I’ll make you… make you what? That was all that repeated in his mind “Make you.”

A scream interrupted his thoughts – animal and tortured. It hitched and grew again.

Xander walked to the basement, listening to the varied timber of agony reverberating through the walls. It almost sounded like the house itself was in pain. He took his time, marveling at the sound.

Willow was standing by the cot in the basement, both hands outstretched as though playing an invisible piano. Her head was cocked to the side, her eyes black.

The screams, of course, were coming from Spike. Bubbles rippled under his skin. One coursed behind a cut on his shoulder and a dollop of blood oozed out, like jam between slices of bread. Spike was writhing, toes and fingers crabbed, vamped out and rubbing his fangy face against the mattress to stifle his own screams. The fitted sheet was torn up, exposing the dull satin of the mattress.

“Woah, Willow!” Xander finally broke his eyes away from the sight and reached out to his friend. The hairs stood up all along his scalp as his hand contacted her arm. “Willow, what are you doing?”

The strange, depthless black faded from her eyes and she dropped her hands. Spike fell limp into the twisted sheets on the cot. “Just getting some answers,” Willow said. “Not that he’s talking. Mr. No talking pants.”

“Wha… what d’ya want me to say?” Spike panted. “Whatever you want, Red. Jus’…”

“You’re going to kill him!” Xander said.

Willow rolled her eyes. “He’s a vampire, Xan. Remember Glory? One week later he was good as new.”

“Yeah but he wasn’t good for anything while he healed.” Xander looked down at Spike like he’d just found his sports car scratched. Spike’s back and arms running with rivulets of blood that marked out the lines of his musculature like pen.

“Spike did something to Buffy. Something that turned her against me. Maybe against all of us!”

“Right,” Spike said, lips still stuck to the sheet under his face. “Thas’ right. Whatever you say.”

“Shut up, Spike,” they both said in unison. “Look,” Xander continued, “It’s not Buffy. You WERE…” he saw her angry frown snap into place and quickly backpedaled, “Right to be upset. But Buffy’s not the problem. Tara’s not the problem. Right? It’s anger. You’re letting your anger think for you.”

Xander straightened, feeling a little smile on his lips. He’d found the break in his own foundation. “Just, relax, okay? Don’t ruin the Spike for the rest of us, kay? He’s the only one we got.”

“And he’s good for what?” Willow demanded. Xander looked uncomfortably away.

Willow scowled. “Ew. Gay now!”

“Hey, straight here! Like, still. Always. I don’t know… I don’t want to explain. You know what? I should really go home. I have to work tomorrow.” He ran a hand over his head and, for once, felt the hair sliding normally around his fingers. “Night, Will,” he said, with an air of exhaustion.

“Good night,” Willow said, a little confused, watching him wearily climb the stairs.

Spike rolled his forehead against the mattress, like a man gripped with fever, whispering softly, “Whatever you want, Red. Please. No more of this.”

Willow set her hand on the back of his head and he instantly stilled. No magic caused this, other than the magic of threat, maybe. He stilled to her touch. She smiled. “Whatever I want?”

***

“What if it isn’t the resurrection spell?” Dawn slouched over the heavy tome in her lap. “What if it’s something completely unrelated?”

“Then we’ll strike out in a new research direction when this one is exhausted,” Giles said, though his special emphasis on the word ‘exhausted’ didn’t sound reassuring. He dropped his glasses angrily on the table and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Tara, how’s the trance coming?”

Tara knelt in a corner by the bookcase, arranging rose quartz crystals. She tucked her hair back behind her ear and looked at Giles with nearly as much exasperation as Dawn had. “Almost there,” she said, quietly and politely, but from Tara, that was as good as an angry snarl.

Giles sighed and picked up his glasses again. “We’ll figure it out,” he said, for the seventh time, “there is an answer and we will find it. But we all must have patience. It’s not like the pizza boy is going to deliver it.”

A knock sounded at the door and Dawn giggled. “Omigaw, wouldn’t it be cool if that was pizza?”

“No, it would be frightening, seeing as I haven’t ordered any,” Giles admonished, putting his glasses back on as he went to the door.

Buffy raised a hand. “Hi, guys.”

Giles stood, one hand still on his glasses, one on the door, mouth hanging wide enough that she could see his molars. Behind him, Tara and Dawn also gaped, leaning toward each other to see around Giles.

“Um, am I interrupting something?”


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this thing is gettin' long huh?
> 
> Warnings: This chapter kinda existential and weird. Also, the cruel writer really pulls a cliffhanger. Wench!

“Um, am I interrupting something?”

“No, Buffy, you certainly aren’t,” Giles said with a smile so tight his teeth looked liable to pop.

Dawn and Tara were staring at her like she was a freak. “I was just looking for Tara. Hey, Tara.” She raised a hand in greeting. Tara weakly mimicked the gesture as Buffy walked into the room.

“I’m glad we all got out of there un-zapped,” Buffy said, frowning. “Willow’s becoming a problem. I think the freaky magic power is going to her head or something. Is that what you guys are talking about? Is this a research party?”

Giles cleared his throat very loudly. “Yes. That is it precisely. And you will be a great help, Buffy.”

Tara and Dawn looked at each other, eyes wide, and then at Giles. Buffy wondered what that was about.

“Yes.” Giles patted Buffy’s shoulder and guided her over to the circle Tara was arranging on the floor. “Tara was just going to do a spell, you see, to detect traces of Willow’s magic and, um, read their auras?” He looked pointedly at Tara who, after a moment, nodded. “Yes, and since Willow cast a spell on YOU recently, Buffy, perhaps it would be easiest to have you as the focus of Tara’s scrying.”

Buffy frowned. “Didn’t Willow cast something on Tara more recently?”

Anya chose that moment to come in from the kitchen, sorting packets of cocoa like a poker hand. “Buttermilk? Is there a reason they’d make a buttermilk cocoa? If you’re going to buy the expensive…” Anya looked up. “What is SHE doing here?”

“Helping us figure out what’s wrong with Willow.” Giles dropped his hand from Buffy’s shoulder and made a shooing gesture.

“I’m not going to leave the room so you can talk about me,” Anya said, and dropped disconsolately into a chair next to Dawn.

Tara rose to take Buffy’s hand. “I can’t focus on myself,” she said, with an apologetic bob of her head. “Here, Buffy, kneel here.”

“I think I’ll go be somewhere else,” Dawn said, sounding sick. She closed her book and stood.

Buffy frowned at Dawn in mild concern, but Giles smiled encouragingly and patted her shoulder, urging her down where Tara indicated, so she let herself be seated.

“When we’re done with this, though, I want to talk, Tara, about you coming back to the house. Willow’s just nuts without you.”

Tara grimaced, but nodded, the curtain of her hair hiding her face then as she arranged her herbs and candles.

***

Spike hadn’t expected this.

Call him traditional, but when he offered to do anything a girl wanted, generally there was some deep tonguing involved. And he was mildly curious to see how well Red’s carpet matched her drapes. He hadn’t expected anything less mundane than coerced sex. It was all Harris and the Slayer had wanted, anyway. So why couldn’t the witch be the same?

These were the fever-tight thoughts in his head as Red did… something. Her hand was flat against his sternum, pressing like she could push right through him, stifling any attempt at breath.

Hot trickles of power were spreading under his skin. He didn’t see it move, this time, but he was feeling it, something, tugging at parts of himself he didn’t know existed, burrowing. Something…

His mind was going. She was plunging through his memories like a spoon into pudding. He felt her, saw himself, saw her, was her, was himself… being consumed, savored, bloody memories like wine.

“Red… please… I could… we could…”

“Sh… shush… there, baby, it’s okay,” she said. Her black eyes unseeing, focused inward. Her lips curled a little. “This is good.” She laughed, softly, “This is really good. Look at all the stuff you have in here!”

***

It started off kind of pleasant, almost like getting a facial. Tara’s soft chanting, the sweet smell of herbs and perfumed candles, infused Buffy like heat and made her relax. She hadn’t felt this calm since… she hadn’t felt this calm in a while.

But then there was a feeling, like the good ache when a masseuse finds a knot and separates it out from the muscle around it, and it grew, until it wasn’t such a good ache, and Buffy felt her breaths grow fast and shallow.

It was there… that feeling… the thing always behind her, out of reach, and Tara was drawing it to them! NO! Buffy tried to stop her, but her hands felt like lead weights at her sides. Tara – sweet, quiet Tara – was shining bright and terrible as a knife, and the darkness was taking form, it was pulling itself off the wall, out of the shadows, and stepping into the room.

Buffy screamed. Every eye in the room snapped to her as she jumped to her feet, pushing Tara away from her.

“Buffy, wait…” Giles interposed himself only to be thrown against the wall in his turn as the slayer rushed out the door, leaving it swinging open behind her.

Anya cried out and hurried to help Giles up. “What is she thinking! You’re fragile and old!”

Giles cringed. “Thank you, Anya.”

Dawn scrambled to help Tara and for a moment the room had an odd symmetry – two women helping two dazed figures to their feet.

“What happened?” Dawn asked. “Tara, are you all right?”

Tara nodded, but when she brushed her hair back her face was shining with tears. “I know what’s happening. I… I saw i-it.”

The white witch seemed unable to support her own weight and drooped in Dawn’s arms as the young girl struggled to get her to the couch.

Giles, recovering faster, brushed Anya’s anxious attentions aside and crouched in front of Tara. “What did you see?” He took her hands and urged her to look up. “Tara. Tell me.”

“It sh-should have been me.” Tara shook her head. “I know what it is, Mr. Giles, and it should have been me.”


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Plot heavy chapter! Muchly the expositiony.

They formed a semi-circle around Tara, waiting patiently for her explanation like children at story-time. She took a few slow, deep breaths and raised her eyes to Giles’. “An equal darkness has to be called to balance the light unfairly brought back with the slayer – it was split among the casters. Except… I-I was wearing a protective talisman.” Tara drew a leather thong out of her blouse and laid the seemingly ordinary glass bauble on her open palm. “I always wear it, when practicing magic. M-my mother gave it to me. S-she said you never knew when m-magic would bite back.” She let the bauble fall against her soft bosom. “I guess the… the piece of darkness that was meant for me entered Buffy, then. She was the n-next nearest soul.”

“You mean they’re possessed?” Dawn frowned. “We just have to exorcise this or something?”

“Sort of.” Tara shook her head. “I’m not sure what you’d call it. Mr. Giles, I hope you know. I felt it. It… didn’t feel intelligent, just… just evil.”

Giles took off his glasses and shook them. “I think… I think I may know what this is. Dawn, hand me the Grimore Balthezar, over there, on the table.” He gestured with his glasses.

Dawn had only to twist in her seat to pick up the heavy tome. “What about Spike?”

“Hrm?” Giles glanced up from readying the book on his lap.

“Well, while you guys are figuring out this evil-pieces thing, how do we rescue Spike?”

“Evil-pieces,” Anya said, frowning, “Why does that make me think of candy?”

“He’s being hurt!” Dawn said. “As we speak.”

“We’ll find something, Dawnie,” Tara said. “We’ll save them all.”

“But how long will it take?”

“Longer if we keep interrupting the man who is researching the solution,” Giles said, pointedly.

Dawn stood up and paced, wringing her hands.

Anya met her on the other side of the table and patted her shoulder. “While Xander and Buffy and Willow are being evil, they’ll want to inflict pain on someone, and really, all things considered, isn’t it better that they have Spike?”

Dawn pulled away and gaped at the ex-demon.

Anya shrugged. “I know, you hate hearing that, but it’s true. Spike can recover from any damage they do to him. Well, I suppose, anything but mental damage – you know they can re-grow brain tissue, but believe me, I’ve seen what happens to lobotomized vampires. If the Federal…”

“You’re awful!” Dawn shouted, fists clenched tight at her sides.

Her steps up the stairs were louder than should have been possible.

“Let her go,” Giles said, barely glancing up from his book. “And Tara? Why don’t you and Anya have talk?”

Tara blanched, but nodded.

“What? Please tell me this isn’t going to be another of those ‘tact’ things.”

Tara took Anya’s elbow and lead her into the kitchen. “It’s one of those tact things,” she said, grimacing.

***

Buffy had never seen Spike cry before. She felt… strangely jealous, looking down on his tear-streaked face and knowing Willow had achieved something she couldn’t. “What are you DOING?”

Willow hadn’t acknowledged Buffy’s entering the basement. Now she turned almost too fast, hair swaying. Her eyes were black, unseeing, but her mouth was wide in a smile. “We’re replaying memories now. Oh I wish you could SEE some of this stuff. Vampires are KINKY.”

“Color me surprised,” Buffy smirked. “Back to earth, Willow! I need to talk to you seriously.”

It was weird to see that black-eyed face pout. Buffy wondered if she shouldn’t just punch Willow again, but no, she needed her awake. This was important.

Willow sighed and stepped back. Her hand dropped like it was stroking a cat on its way down and Spike shuddered to stillness – she hadn’t noticed he was shaking before, perhaps because it was so constant.

The black seeped out of Willow’s eyes gently and she blinked a few times until her irises were again green. “Did you find Tara?”

Willow looked so relaxed now, Buffy bit her lip, hating to ruin that. “There’s something wrong with Tara. Maybe… maybe something wrong with Giles and Anya too. I’m not sure what, but they did something to her, Willow.”

Willow’s brow crinkled. “My Tara? What? How?”

“I don’t know.” Buffy set a steadying hand on her friend’s arm. “They… okay, we… thought there might be something wrong with you, why you’ve been so ‘spell first ask questions later’.” Buffy winced at the darkening expression on Willow’s face. “But I realize that was wrong!” She quickly added. “I went to Tara and she asked to do a spell on me, and she conjured up something evil, Willow. I don’t know what she would have done next because I ran.”

Willow blinked, shock momentarily blanking her anger. “YOU ran?”

Buffy sighed. “Our friends are turning evil, Willow. I’ve never faced anything like this. We should find Xander; he could be affected!”

Willow nodded solemnly.

There was a strange, coughing sound, and it took Buffy a moment to realize it was Spike laughing. His face was pressed to the back of his hand on the cot and his shoulders shook with mirth while his eyes were locked on her with a diamond-tipped hatred.

Buffy shook her head and hurried up the stairs and out of the basement before she lost all day taking that look off his face.

***

Giles’ condo shared a long balcony with the other units in the building. It ran along the street-side of the complex and separated out each unit of balcony with a pretty metal lattice. The metal lattices were easy to swing around, scooting your butt along the railing, and at the end of the building a low roof abutted, the top of a laundromat. At the back of the laundromat’s roof there was a convenient safety ladder.

Thus Dawn slipped expertly away from the others. Shouldering her backpack she jogged down the road. Buffy might have super-strength, but she was still the same girl Dawn had stolen lip gloss and Barbie dolls from. Someone was going to have to rescue Spike, and she was tired of waiting.


	20. Chapter 20

“We can pull the darkness from them,” Giles paced the room, somehow navigating with his glasses in one hand and staring at an open book in the other. “The trouble is we need to put it somewhere.”

“Could we trap it, like in an orb?” Tara ducked out of his way and tried to peer over the edge of the book.

“Well, it’s a problem. This occurred to maintain the balance of the universe. We lock the energy in a static vessel and, well, it would be a moot point. A darker energy could rise to compensate.”

Giles chewed on the end of his ear-piece and turned to pace in the other direction, nearly bowling Tara over again.

“Put it in a rabbit,” Anya suggested, looking up from her Modern Bride magazine. (Which she had produced from parts unknown the moment it was explained that “her snuggle-bear” would be himself again.) “Or something like that, small and furry and kill-able.” She motioned with her hands over the florid pages of her magazine. “Put evil in bunny. Smash bunny! Problem solved.”

Giles grimaced and changed pacing directions yet again.

“What? It’s a perfectly valid plan.”

“Perhaps, Anya, perhaps. But if the… rodent can’t contain the energy? If the powers that be find this unacceptable?”

“Either way, we get Xander back.”

Tara bit her lip. “She has a point.”

“I don’t think it will work. Look here,” Giles went to the bookshelf and tabbed through titles a bit before drawing a new book out and setting it on top of the one he had been consulting. “The vessel, deemed unworthy, could explode, and the energies would be reflected back in to the castors – we’d be back where we started.”

The door burst open. Dawn glanced only a moment at them before stepping aside, holding the door behind her. “Come on, Spike,” she said.

Her jeans were damp around the cuffs and she smelled slightly of pungent odors.

A bundle of camping equipment rushed the door, smoking slightly.

Spike shook his head, stamping the sleeping bag where it smoldered on the floor, smelling strongly of burning rubber and plastic.

He waved his hand over his hair just to make sure it wasn’t on fire then looked up, smirking. “Hullo, Rupert. Mind if I come in?”

Giles closed his book. “Dawn?”

“I rescued Spike,” the teen said proudly, closing the front door and leaning against it as though afraid she and her vampire charge would be thrown into the street.

Tara picked up the sleeping-bag and started folding it against her chest. “How… Dawnie, I’m so proud of you.”

Giles put his glasses back on. “That was reckless. Careless. What if you were caught?”

“Did you see Buffy? Was Xander with him?” Anya stood, hands clasped in front of her.

Spike ignored all this, heading straight for Rupert’s refrigerator and peering around in it and the freezer until he found a forgotten packet of blood. His stomach was about to climb up his esophagus and find sustenance on its own.

“Do you mind?” Giles snapped.

“No,” Spike smirked, purposefully grabbing Giles’ favorite mug.

“Buffy and Willow were leaving just when I arrived,” Dawn said. “I think they said they were going to Xander’s. They probably don’t know Spike’s gone yet.”

“This could be our chance,” Anya pointed at Dawn. “All three of them in the same place. Let’s go to my house!”

Giles rubbed his temples. “We still haven’t settled the problem of the vessel.”

“Vessel?” Dawn looked to Tara, who was smoothing the singed comforter, now folded on the couch.

“Three pieces of malevolent spirit,” Tara said. “Are inside them. We… we can pull them out, but they have to go into s-something. Somewhere.”

“Can’t we just use some orb or vase or something?” Dawn looked at the defeated faces in front of her. “Come on, it’s not like we haven’t ever had to, oh, entrap a soul before.”

“Not like that, bit.” Spike set down his now-empty mug with a sigh. “S’gotta be a person, sentient. This kind of evil doesn’t bind to rocks and twigs. Put it in a bowl and it’ll just explode, create a portal or rift or some other pain-in-the-arse.”

“You know about summoning backfire spirits?” Giles peered at the vampire.

Spike gave him his best “Duh” eye-roll and turned to poke around in the refrigerator. “’S a balance thing, right? Someone didn’t read her fine print? We gotta keep the evil or we lose whatever good was summoned.” Spike turned to rest his shoulders against the ‘fridge, a Chinese take-out box in his hands. He scooped lo mein noddles with his fingers and shook them briefly at Giles. “I’m not an idiot. It’s Buffy, isn’t it? Getting her back.”

Giles stared at Spike with cold intensity. “We are not losing Buffy. Not again. That isn’t an option.”

“Didn’t say it was,” Spike said, around a mouth full of lo mein. He licked his fingers. “Put it in me. That solves your problem.”

There was a long moment of silence. Four people stood still while Spike continued to devour the leftover Chinese food with the occasional very casual glance up at them.

“Great,” Anya said. “That works, right? Giles, does that work? Can we go now before Xander and Buffy aren’t where we think they are?”

Tara stepped forward, putting her hands on the little counter that separated Giles’ kitchen from the living area. “You don’t want to do this.”

Spike raised his eyebrows at her. “Just said I did. Look, I want the slayer back in all her annoying self-righteous glory, takin’ care of the bit, punching me in the nose. Like it should be.” He paused, head cocked. “Wait, what am I saying?” He smirked and chucked the empty carton into the sink.

“Do not be flippant about this,” Giles seethed. “Either you agree to this or you don’t. Tara, get the extraction spell ready. Anya will help you find whatever components you need.”

“But…”

Giles put a hand on Tara’s shoulder. “Whatever we decide, this needs to be done.”

Dawn took a more direct approach, stomping up to the vampire and smacking him.

Spike blinked in wide-eyed shock at Dawn.

“You are not sacrificing yourself for her.”

Spike swallowed. “You’re right, Bit, I’m not. Already evil inside, aren’t I? Can handle a bit more, no sweat. And there’s still the chip, right?”

They were staring intently at each other and didn’t notice Giles until he spoke, he was right by Dawn’s elbow and she jumped.

“We need a commitment, Spike. Can you do this?”

“Red has to be stopped,” Spike said. “And I don’t see any of you lot having the bollocks to hold real evil.” He pushed his way between them. “Wake me when it’s time to save the world.”


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can you feel the tension mounting? The climax, she is upon us!
> 
> (Uh... try not to read that all porn-y. Because this part? Not so much.)
> 
> Don't know if she's reading or even likes this one, but I dedicate today's post to **shapinglight**! She's reason the internet was invented!

Anya hadn’t come home.

Xander paced with a beer bottle in his fist. It wasn’t that he was asking for much. He just wanted her home when he was. Did she do this on purpose? Did she want him to hit her?

Someone knocked on the door. He threw the beer bottle into the wall. It stubbornly refused to break, falling to foam over the carpet like a drooling dog.

He wrenched the door open to see a very concerned Willow. He ran a hand through his hair. “What?”

The next thing he knew, he was flung against the picture window, arms splayed at his sides and when he tried to move he felt like he was held with duct-tape.

Willow walked slowly into the room, her open palm aimed at him.

“Easy, Will,” Buffy said, following her in and waving to Xander. “We don’t know for sure he’s gone evil.”

Xander felt feverish, his head nearly exploding from pressure. They know they know they know. “Wh… who’s evil?”

“Tara,” Willow said with a tremulous frown.

“Maybe Anya and Giles too,” Buffy said.

They know they know they know. Xander couldn’t stop the claxon of fear in his brain until anger took its place – how dare they make him feel this way? He kept his poker face on. He spoke calmly, his voice as much himself as he could make it. “Woah… easy there, gals. No evil here.”

“How can we be sure?” Willow asked, tilting her head. There was an eager expression on her face. “Should I take a walk inside?”

“No! Buff! I’m me! I’m… I’m concerned about Anya too. Hey… hey, didn’t I help you with your vampire problem? Buffy? Would I have done that if I was evil?”

Both girls looked at each other with soft smiles, fondly remembering.

Xander sank to the ground, his limbs free to move again. “Damn, Wills, you scared me.”

“Fighting the big evil and all,” she said, “Gotta be careful.”

***

“What the hell are you doing?” Dawn crawled into the back of Anya’s car, practically into Spike’s lap, hissing in his ear.

Spike shrugged. “What I have to do.”

“We’re not sacrificing you.”

He raised an eyebrow, smiling at her.

“Shut up,” she said. “We’re not.”

“It’s not a sacrifice. Told you, I can take it. We’ll get the Slayer and her little friends back.”

Dawn lowered her voice as Anya and Giles got in the front seat, Tara wedged between them, holding a cardboard box of magical supplies which Anya hurriedly counted.

“And what if you’re weird as they are afterward?”

Spike smirked at her. “Unlikely. Look, I’d die to save your sister. This? We’re getting off cheap.”

Dawn was quiet. She turned away from him and fastened her seatbelt.

Spike didn’t wear seatbelts, and spread his legs wide, taking up two thirds of the seat, just so everyone would know.

As they pulled onto the main road, Dawn tucked her chin down and asked, “What about me?”

“You stay in the car and out of the line of fire,” Spike said.

“No. I mean… would you die for me?”

Spike’s expression froze a moment, as did Dawn’s heart. He looked away. “’Course I would. Should have, on that tower.”

Dawn tightened her fists on her lap. “Have you ever done this before?” He finally glanced back at her. “This… carrying an evil spirit inside you? Do you know what you’re getting into?”

He coughed and looked away again. “Yeah. Sure.”

“World’s crappiest liar,” Dawn muttered.

***

“The way I see it, we have to contain the magic front first. That’s Giles and Tara.” Buffy paced Xander’s living room, twirling a stake. “I’ll knock Giles out. Willow can hold Tara off. That leaves Xander to take care of Anya. Xan? Can you take your girlfriend down?”

“Yeah, easily.” Xander hopped from foot to foot, a little irritated Buffy was concerned about his ability to knock out a single, unarmed girl. He was itching to go. He started sorting through his tools. Claw hammer or Peen for clubbing her? No… peen… less chance of getting caught in the flesh.

He held the claw hammer a long time, trying not to want that violence.

“Guys… someone’s here!” Willow stood on the couch and with a casual gesture sent the blinds flying off the windows.

Xander tightened his grip on the hammer, remembering how long it took to hang the blinds.

A car stopped in the middle of the parking lot, blocking three others in rather than taking the spot at the end of the row. The doors opened quickly and immediately he recognized Anya’s hair.

Giles stood by the passenger door, looking up directly at them.

“So much for taking the fight to them.” Buffy jumped up to the back of the couch, perching on one knee like a general scanning the battlefield below. “Willow, stay here. Start doing what you do. Xander, we have to get close fast. Magic has all the advantage at distance.”

He tossed her the claw hammer and together they marched out of the apartment.

***

“They know we’re here,” Giles said.

“Good.” Spike jumped out of the car and shook his arms, straightening out the brown hoodie. “I hate sneak attacks.”

“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” Giles asked, narrowing his eyes at Spike. “We’re not fighting. You’re staying here with Tara and letting her cast on you. You do realize that?”

“Know the plan, watcher. How about a little less faffing about in Little Red Riding Witch’s line of fire and a little more action?”

Giles sighed and glanced at Anya, who nodded her readiness. They started toward the door of the apartment complex, shoulder to shoulder. Anya held a book open in front of her. Giles’ hands were at his sides, fingers twitching while he chanted under his breath.

Dawn stood still in the vee between the car door and the car, holding the window-top. Tara was bent over, pouring salt into a circle on the pavement around Spike, who looked ready to leap out of his skin in readiness to hit something.

He scrunched his sleeves up and looked at her. “It’s gonna be fine, Bit. But don’t come closer.”

She sunk down behind the car-door, wishing she could believe him.


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... of twenty-four.
> 
> Yeah you heard it, baby. I done finished and have it aaalll compartmentalized for delivery. I shall now be cruel and parcel out the story. bwa ha ha ha.
> 
> Warnings: Action sequences abound

Buffy and Xander made a lot of noise running down the stairs. They didn’t have time or need for concealment. Anya flinched at the sound when they turned the landing.

Giles was perfectly steady. “Hello, Buffy. Alexander. I recommend you don’t come any closer.”

Buffy tapped a hammer against her palm. “Whatever you are, you made a big mistake possessing MY watcher.”

Anya slunk back behind Giles, curling her book protectively to her chest. Xander had a hateful, calm look on his face. It was a look she’d seen on the faces of murderers, psychotics and dictators over her long life.

“It may be hard to believe, Buffy, but I am not possessed. There is a spirit inside of you. It isn’t sentient. Tara…”

Buffy jumped from the top of the landing. Giles threw his hand up, and she was caught in mid-air, arms over her head, elbows bent, the hammer cocked back, ready to bear down on the watcher’s head.

A trickle of sweat slipped down his temple as Giles shook with impact, almost like she HAD hit him. His hand wavered and he spoke. “You will be still. You will listen. There isn’t much time until this is all ended.”

“Xander!” Anya squeaked.

Her fiancé walked down the steps, slowly, unperturbed by the slayer floating before him.

Giles held out a hand toward him. “Young man, think about what you are doing. I will stop you by any means necessary.”

“Funny thing, evil G-man, you don’t look up to that.” Xander reached around Giles, grabbed Anya’s upper arm.

She screamed and hit him with the book.

In the air, Buffy wavered, her arms straightened just an inch. She licked her lips. “Keep attacking, Xan! He’s barely holding me. He’ll have to choose.”

“It’s off!” Anya shouted, hair flying in her face as she twisted, slamming the precious old magic tome into Xander again and again, not knowing that the distinct cracking of binding-glue and sent of shredding vellum were as distracting to Giles as her own imminent danger.

Xander punched, sending Anya and her book flying in near trajectories.

Gile’s concentration wavered. He looked at Xander, unsure a moment what to do, what he COULD do, as the youth advanced on Anya with murderous intent, his forearm flexing as he tightened his grip on his hammer.

And Buffy let out a groan, a gasp, like the involuntary sound one might make after loosening a girdle. She swam against thickened air, her toes scrapping linoleum briefly as she swung. Slow-motion the hammer did little more than break the rest of Giles’ concentration.

“Bloody hell.” He scrambled back, no longer a powerful mage but just a man, trying to put himself between Anya and two separate dangers.

He caught Xander’s hammer haft against his forearm and his knees buckled.

_Hurry, Tara._ He silently prayed as Buffy shook off the binding spell like so much water and advanced.

***

Spike could say he was honestly not thinking about his part in this little confrontation. He was listening intently to what he could hear inside the building, which wasn’t much, and half of that was imagined. His muscles were strained like a hound on the leash scenting danger.

He wanted nothing more than to run into that building and, chip or no, kick some witch and construction worker ass.

Tara knelt between him and their foes, her back to him, chanting and rocking with increasing pitch. It was disturbingly like one of Dru’s fits. But then, he’d always suspected magic and madness were related.

Tara cried out, like she was struck. She bent nearly double. Spike dropped to one knee and put a hand on her back. “What is it, Glinda?”

Tara flung her head back and howled. “Willow! I. Won’t. Be. Moved.”

Dawn rose on her toes and ducked again behind the car, unsure how to move. “What do we do? Spike! We have to do something!”

“Distract Red,” Spike said, looking around frantically for any means of doing so.

Dawn darted out from behind the car, picking up a rock from the pavement she flung it at the building.

She danced behind them, picking up rocks and throwing them until she hit the glass in front of that vague red shape that was Willow. She threw another rock large enough to crack the glass as it hit.

Dawn fell back with a startled shout, landing in the rhododendrons that separated the parking lot from the sidewalk.

Spike tensed and turned toward her, only to feel Tara’s hand grab him frantically. “No! Stay in the circle. Almost done. Eratte! Diosa nomine!”

And then he felt something like chilled, dirty dishwater seeping into his arm from her fingers, spreading into him. Violation. No. He was evil already. It shouldn’t feel like this.

Dawn scrambled to her feet, scraping her palms on the pavement as she picked up the nearest likely object and hurled it with all her might toward Willow. “You bitch! I’m never talking to you again!” She screamed and staggered, looking for something else. Where was super-strength when you needed it? Buffy could have thrown the Ford Festiva in the nearest parking space. That would have stopped Willow!

Dawn was interrupted in her unhelpful strategizing by a combined moan, male and female. She saw Spike and Tara collapse onto each other, both hands clasped, a writhing shadow passing between them.

“I sure hope that’s what’s supposed to happen,” Dawn muttered and ran back behind Anya’s Toyota.

***

Buffy flung the hammer aside. “Oh so not with the quick take-down,” she said. “You are going to feel and regret.”

“Giles!” Anya ducked under the elbows of the two men who were locked in struggle. She held her hands in front of her, crouched, unsure what, if anything, she could do to slow down a super-strong being. Where were vengeance powers when you really NEEDED them?

Giles pulled one arm free and landed a lucky right hook, staggering Xander back. He took Anya’s arm and together they faced Buffy. “Don’t do this,” Giles said. “Buffy, all you have to do is wait.”

“I’ve been waiting all day,” Buffy responded, rolling her shoulders. Almost casually she stepped forward and kicked him.

Giles flew through the glass doors to the building. Glass shattered and fell around him, skittering with him on the concrete as he flopped, helpless, unconscious.

“Let’s be reasonable,” Anya said, backing away. “You… you said you didn’t want to be quick! Why make it over for us too soon? Bad, bad us! We should suffer. Right?”

Buffy took hold of her thin arms and twisted, tossing Anya easily after Giles.

“Quit lying around on the job,” she quipped, stepping over Xander and picking up his hammer. “Let’s nail this… get it? Let’s…”

And she crumbled to the ground like a discarded robe.

***

Dawn saw Willow disappear from the picture window of Xander’s apartment. The glass glinted like water and hid the depths of the room behind so she didn’t know if Willow had fallen or simply taken a step back.

Then she saw Giles ejected through the glass doors into the building like a spit-out seed. She ducked behind the car, as low as she could go, and heard another crash and fall.

There was nothing she could do but sit and hope.


	23. Chapter 23

It was entering him, wriggling like worms. Was this what she felt? He should kill the witch! Bugger the chip! He would find a way. A trap. There was so much an industrious vampire could do with fishing line and razors.

Blood. Violence. He needed to see it, not just to gratify himself but for its own end. His skin itched all over to touch blood, to feel pain to…

This wasn’t him. This was the spirit. He knew that. He’d hold still. He’d wait until he knew it was his own mind, his own decision. THEN he would kill the bitch. Take her apart.

Spike knelt in the center of the protective circle, panting. His eyes were focused on his own hands, which were stretched, claw-like, in front of him.

Tara scrambled over the salt-line, dropping the first sheet of her spell-notes carelessly. “In Gaia’s name I beseech thee, hold this beast in this circle. In the name of the mother, of the earth, of the hand that feeds I invoke thee.”

Spike slipped into game face and snarled at her. He lunged forward, only to be knocked back by the invisible barrier of the protection circle.

Dawn crawled from behind the front fender of Anya’s car. “Is it… is he? Is it done?”

Only then did Tara let herself acknowledge that yes, she was done. She almost collapsed with relief. “Yes, sweetie. We’re done.” She held out an arm and Dawn ran to her. They hugged tight, two feet from the circle where Spike was now pacing. It was only wide enough for him to take two steps in any direction, but he did it anyway, reaching out to touch walls the rest of them couldn’t feel, snarling as energy snapped and crackled around him.

Buffy came out of the building. “Oh my god, Giles!” She ran to her watcher, falling heedless to her knees in the crushed glass to lift him.

“What… what’s going to happen to Spike?” Dawn winced, unable to look at her friend in such a state. He wasn’t Spike, he was a caged animal.

“We wait. I-if he can control himself, c-control the e-evil, we’ll let him out.”

Dawn pulled away from Tara. “Wait? How long?”

“I don’t know, sweetie. We might never be sure.”

Dawn jumped to her feet. “We’re outside! The sun will come up in, like, eight hours!”

“I-I know. Dawn, sweetie, he agreed to this. We may just have to let him… let him go.”

“No!” Dawn shrugged off a proffered hand. “No. That’s bull! We are NOT letting him go.” She turned and ran, sneakers pelting over the grass and down the street.

***

Buffy didn’t know that she could not know. She fell, not from magic or exhaustion but the weight of realization. Something… something left her, a blindness, a block on her eyes and mind fell away leaving her fully aware of how WRONG she’d been. Was. It… oh god, she’d kicked Giles. Giles! Full-force!

“Don’t be dead. Oh please. Giles? Oh God. Giles!” She scrambled after him.

He laid like a broken doll, suit-jacket all up around his shoulders like a deflated balloon. She lifted him to her, pressed her lips to his neck half to feel the pulse and half to keep from sobbing. He was alive. She felt along his limbs, felt the bones. Right side, left side, intact. Ribs? She didn’t know how to test them. She laid him on his back, straightened his clothes and his limbs. “Giles, I’m so, so sorry. Please wake up. I didn’t know… I didn’t know it was you.”

“Buffy!” A hand pulled urgently on her sleeve. “Buffy, l-let me. You h-have to go after Dawn. Buffy!”

Tara was trembling, dragging Buffy up and away from Giles. She pointed frantically down the street.

“Dawn?” Buffy asked.

“She ran off. It’s night. Sh-she needs to be safe. Go get her. Bring her back. I’ll take care of Giles and Anya.”

It was all happening so fast. She had her mind back two minutes and already Dawn was in trouble. She nodded and turned.

Spike growled at her, hands out at his sides, fingers twitching for a fight. “What’s with Spike?”

“He’s fine,” Tara said, unconvincingly, and pushed Buffy toward the road.

***

Anya rolled on the sidewalk, not unconscious, but wishing she was. Giles… had to find where he was, and Buffy and…

Xander poked his head out of the ruined doorway, touching the aluminum frame hesitantly.

Anya scrambled to her feet, looking for a weapon. She picked up a large piece of glass, though it cut into her hand. “Stay away from me, Xander Harris!”

Xander swallowed a dry lump. “Anya.” He raised his hands. “Ahn, I…”

She threw the glass at him and ran.

Tara looked up from where she was crouched by Giles. “Help me get him into the car,” she said.

Xander nodded mutely.

***

Buffy found Dawn wandering into nearby Shady Rest cemetery, shouting, “Here vampires! Heeeeere boys! Come and get it! Tasty key, available now!”

Buffy grabbed her. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?” Dawn wrested her arm from her sister’s grip. “I’m saving Spike.”

Buffy frowned. “Ooooohkay. Someone forgot to give me a script.”

“He volunteered to have the evil put in him, to save YOU. Seems to me if it worked on one vampire it’ll work on another.” Dawn turned, gesturing to the shady tombstones. “Where’s a vampire when you need one?”

Buffy set her hands on her hips. “Dawn, you are NOT capturing a vampire.” She frowned. “I can’t believe I just said that. Can we argue about you staying out too late or dating scary boys or something?”

Dawn just turned and walked deeper into the cemetery.

“Dawn! Come back here right now. You’re not risking your safety like this.”

Dawn snorted, stepping around a tombstone. “Who’s risking? I have the vampire slayer on my back.”

“Look, I just had an evil… something pulled out of me that’s been there since I Rose From The Dead.”

“So no one else has a right to feel bad?” Dawn turned to glare at her sister. “After all the things you DID? That I had to watch?”

Buffy cringed. In a very small voice, she said, “It’s just confusing and we should get back to Giles. He’ll know what to do.”

“Giles?” Dawn tossed her hair. “Giles doesn’t care about Spike.”

“Spike’s a vampire.”

“And? So? Angel was too.”

“Yeah, and Giles didn’t like him, either. Dawn, let’s just go. This is crazy, standing around a cemetery hoping a vampire will attack. You don’t even know what the plan is.”

Dawn thought she DID know the plan, and it ended in Spike being reduced to ashtray contents. But her sister was looking at her with real concern, real love, for the first time in months. Buffy was really back. She allowed herself a small measure of hope. Buffy could solve things. “Yeah, okay,” she said, shrugging. “All the monsters probably have, like, an APB on avoiding that freaky Dawn kid.”

“They should,” Buffy said. “I’d kick their asses special.” She held out a hand for her sister.

That was when the demon attacked.


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here it is - double-length for your conclusion enjoyment!
> 
> Many thanks to **dreamsofspike** who gave a last-minute pre-read and greatly helped the ending. This is much stronger than what I was originally going to foist on y'all!

“Please, Red. Let me out. Glinda’s out of her mind. I’m not going to hurt anyone. It’s me, yeah? Got a little extra of the bad, maybe, but nothing I can’t handle. Nothing more than a shot of espresso to a demon such as me.”

Willow stared in dismay, unable to form a coherent understanding except that ‘shot of espresso’ sounded about right. Spike was jittering in place. Touching his face and his arms and just… fidgeting in a weird way.

Tara came up to her, standing warily away, and who could blame her? It felt like icicles stabbing Willow’s gut to see that caution in her lover’s face.

“G-Giles is doing better,” Tara said. “He’s concussed, I think, but awake.”

“Gliiiiinda,” Spike purred, all seduction. “You know I wouldn’t hurt you, pet. Can’t with this chip in my noggin, now, can I?” He slouched, pouting at her.

“What are we going to do about him?” Willow couldn’t look away from the twitchy vampire.

“We d-didn’t really th-think this far. But i-it’s out of you, sweetie.”

Willow grimaced. “That… whatever it was. It made me… I felt so…” Willow wrapped her arms tight around herself. “Now it’s in him. In the super-strong immortal guy. This… this isn’t an improvement.”

“We didn’t have a lot of time to plan.”

Willow nodded, biting her lip. “Because super-scary witch was going to do who knows what.”

“Were you?”

Willow nodded, not taking her eyes off Spike. “Oh yeah.”

***

After breaking three of its four arms, Buffy was able to twist the last in such a way that the demon – which she would classify as ‘reddish scaly’ – more or less complied with being driven down the street.

By ‘more or less’ one had to assume a lot of head-tossing and wriggling, and the thing had horns poking out of it just all over.

“Don’t,” Buffy grunted, kneeing the thing to dislodge a butt-spike (and oh boy did she wish that was a pun) from her hip. “EVER say I…” she grunted as the thing jabbed her again. “Don’t do anything for you.”

“This is great.” Dawn ran ahead, turning now and again to check on Buffy and the demon’s progress. “I so owe you.”

Buffy grimaced, remembering all of the past month. “Somehow, I doubt.”

***

He had to hold still. Had to look non-threatening. Had to convince the snackables to let him out of the circle so he could take this heat out of his skin and rub it into theirs.

But it was getting hard to listen to their words, which would be giving him hints, he was sure, if he could suffer them.

And it was hard to hold still. His skin was too tight; he could feel his bones stretching it, longing to be free. Maybe he should just rip it and be done. Maybe that would alarm them. They’d try to stop him, break the circle for poor old stupid Spike.

He dug his fingernails into the flesh of one cheek, watching Red. Red was talking, her face a pale oval. Her brows crinkled. Good. She was watching then.

Tepid blood felt good, wetting his fingers. He licked them, felt the sharp nails against his tongue.

The witches were moving. He blinked away the haze to see them rushing to the side. A Delornak demon was thrashing about, some little blonde thing tied around its waist… no, wait, that was the slayer. Good. He shifted into a fighting stance, his fists at the ready, edged as close as he could to the circle. A wrong step, a thrown demon, and the circle could break.

His eyes danced, watching the violence of the poor demon’s struggle. He’d kill it, then take out the slayer. What had he been waiting for, again?

The buzzing at the back of his skull made his vision blur again. Someone was chanting. He shook it away, tried to find the demon again, the slayer… why wasn’t she ripping the thing apart already, instead of bucking around with it like a weight on a tether?

Something took hold of his sternum and yanked him back. He staggered, momentarily held up only by the burning energy of the circle’s invisible walls. He fell to his knees. Black dots chased each other over the image of his pale hands, claw-like against the black pavement. There was another tug. Ripping.

He felt deflated, falling now, really, onto his hands, onto the ground, falling into himself again. It was gone, oh thank god it was gone.

And someone was pulling him up. That didn’t make sense. Hands gripping around his ribs, tugging. Satin-like hair fell against his wounded cheek.

“Come on, come on, stand up. I can’t carry you.”

He put his hand on her shoulder and looked up at Dawn’s serious face.

“Did you save me, Bit?”

“That’s two you owe me,” she replied, a smile breaking unbidden.

“No. No, pet. Owe you a lot more.”

She supported his weight, stepping him over the line of salt that was just a line of salt now.

Buffy was standing over the Delornak demon, wiping its green ichor-like blood off her hands. She glanced briefly at him and then hurriedly returned to concentrating on her task, not looking up until Dawn had Spike tucked into the back of the Toyota. With the safe distance of glass between them, Buffy stared, her plump lower lip sucked into her mouth.

“Don’t ever do something like that again,” Dawn said. “Stupid vampire.”

He felt drunk, holding on to Dawn’s hand seemed the only thing to do. Giles got into the front seat. “I don’t know if I’m fit to drive. Xander?”

***

They broke apart as they got to the house, the dawn streaking the horizon. Spike ran through the door and then stopped, unsure what to do while Xander ran to the phone to call Anya and Dawn stormed up the stairs on some errand of Buffy’s. Willow and Tara were the last to enter the house, their arms entwined, heads together, talking softly like they had a language all their own.

Spike walked into the kitchen to find Buffy washing a cut on Giles’ arm over the sink. The watcher was fighting with her for the washcloth. “I can do it myself, Buffy, it’s not a life-threatening…”

Giles quieted as he followed Buffy’s gaze to Spike. They were all still for a moment.

“Thought I’d see if you needed help,” Spike said, his voice hoarse.

He cleared his throat.

“Oh god,” Buffy said.

Giles easily took the washcloth from her limp hand.

She took one step toward him. “Spike. I…”

He took a step back, stopped himself with a laugh and a shake of his head. “S’okay. I’ll just… be somewhere else.”

A warm hand rested on his arm. He jumped and turned to see Dawn, holding the blue plastic box that held Buffy’s first aid kit.

She stepped slowly past him and handed the box to Buffy. She took him by the elbow and led him into the hall. “Come on, Spike. Help me upstairs.”

He nodded and let her draw him away.

“Big sis not ready to face me?” He asked as they went up the stairs.

“More like are you ready to face her?” Dawn stopped in the hallway, looking back at him.

He grimaced.

“Spike, you’ve been a walking zombie ever since Tara did her spell on you. Don’t tell me you’re just fine.”

He looked around. “What am I helpin’ you with up here?”

She sighed and grabbed his wrist, dragging him after her into her bedroom. “Vampire maintenance,” she said.

He coughed. “Bit! I’m fine. I’m… evil, yeah? This is an evil guy you’re talking to.”

She dropped onto her bed, arms crossed. “Define ‘evil’.”

“Well I think most philosophers would agree eatin’ people qualifies.”

“Which you don’t do anymore.”

He sighed heavily and rested his forearm on the doorframe. “Not by choice, Niblet.”

She was silent for a while. “Okay. Maybe naïve little Dawnie can’t understand the darkness that is the vampire. But I know you, Spike. I’m not some giddy pre-teen with a crush on the bad boy. Can’t you trust me to know myself?”

He raised his head. “Yeah,” he said.

He walked to the bed sat down next to her. “So,” he said, looking at his hands in his lap, “What does the mature woman have to say?”

“Are you going to be okay with Buffy and Xander?”

He sighed. “Might be a while before I stop wantin’ to kill ‘em. Honest truth, pet. I want to rip Xander’s lungs out through his throat. Even knowing what he was dealing with… can’t separate what happened from the people. Don’t want to have anything to do with Willow. Ever again, yeah? Buffy, though… she wasn’t that bad.”

“How can you say that?”

He smiled quietly at her.

She took his hand. “Sometimes I want to kill my sister too, you know.”

“No you don’t.”

“I do! And I could have thrown a rock through Willow’s head and not felt bad about it.”

He raised his eyebrow. “You might have promise there.”

She shrugged. “Did it bother you – the extra evil? Did it make you feel, I dunno, less evil?”

He ducked his head. “From the mouths of babes.”

“Hey!” She smacked him. “Mature woman, remember?”

“From the mouths of hot babes,” he amended, and took her hand. He looked down at his thumb working over her knuckles. “Yeah. Scary insight there. I… thought I knew evil. It was where I lived. Now, I’m not so sure.” He shrugged. “Kind of a blow to the old ego.”

She put her arm around his shoulders. “You’ll always be evil to me.”

“Not reassuring, but thanks,” he said, patting her arm awkwardly.

She straightened, withdrawing her arm. “I’m never going to be more than ‘little bit’ to you, am I? You’re always just going to see me as a child.”

“No,” he said, eyebrows drawing together. “Not at all.” He drew a lock of hanging hair back from her face. “Haven’t been a child for a long time, Platelet. You caught me, when I fell off the tower. Seems like you’re still catching me.”

“Spike!” Willow stopped in the hallway, looking in at them. “It’s daylight outside. Where are you going to sleep?”

Dawn felt him stiffen. “Right. All done being helpful. Time to leave.” He stood.

“Oh no.” Willow recoiled. “No don’t go. Y-You can sleep on the cot in the basement.”

His clenched fists shook. “Ta. But I’ll take the sun.”

“Spike, no.” Dawn jumped between them. “I’ll get Xander to take down the chains. Is Xander still here?”

“Yeah. He got a hold of Anya… but she wanted to spend some time alone so he’s crashing on the couch.”

Spike protested all the way down to the living room. He turned his face away when Xander apologized and ran out to get his tool box.

Dawn made him come down, though, and after Xander grunted and groaned for a full minute over the first cut, Spike took the bolt cutters and snipped the chain loops like he was cutting plastic. He tossed the bolt cutters to Xander hard enough that he staggered back a little from a chip-fire.

Xander excused himself and hurried up the stairs. Dawn tossed the bits of broken chain-links into the trash can full of lint by the dryer. Spike stood, looking at the cot.

He flinched a little when she touched his elbow. “You’re exhausted,” she said. “We all are. It’s just a bed.”

He nodded, heaved a sigh, and laid himself down.

***

Spike awoke with Dawn curled next to him, a warm, soft shape. He stared at her peaceful face and brushed hair from her cheek.

Her eyelids scrunched, and then fluttered open. She shifted onto her side, smiling at him. “I didn’t want you to wake up alone,” she said. “Down here, I mean. How…” she shook her head, “How are you?”

“Dunno. Have to get used to the little bit rescuin’ me all the time.”

“Well, don’t need rescuing so much.” She smacked his arm. “And I’m not little anymore. Pick something else to call me. No more ‘bite size’ jokes. Buffy’s smaller than me now.”

He rested his cheek on his arm. “Right you are, Dawn.”

And she felt her heart swell. “Dawn” not even “Dawnie.” Her cheeks felt liable to split from smiling. “So you’re not mad I snuck into bed with you?”

“Nothing more beautiful to wake up to than the Dawn,” he said, and his thumb passed over her cheek.

She was kissing him before she had time to think about whether it was right or wrong. His lips were slack at first, and she pulled back to see him gaping in astonishment at her.

“Then let’s wake up like this all the time,” she said, and turned her back to him.

He set his hand on her hip, listened for a moment to the sounds upstairs of someone unpacking groceries and someone else sweeping. “All right,” he said, and curled his arm more securely around her. Together, they drifted back into a doze, feeling secure.

They had finally landed.


End file.
